Entertainment / Literature / Fable: A brief story illustrating human tendencies through animal characters. Unlike the parables, fables often include talking animals or animated objects as the principal characters. The interaction of these animals or objects reveals general truths about human nature, i.e., a person can learn practical lessons from the fictional antics in a fable. However, unlike a parable, the lesson learned is not necessarily allegorical. Each animal is not necessarily a symbol for something else. Instead, the reader learns the lesson as an exemplum--an example of what one should or should not do. The sixth century (BCE) Greek writer Aesop is most credited as an author of fables, but Phaedrus and Babrius in the first century (CE) expanded on his works to produce the tales we know today. A famous collection of Indian fables was the Sanskrit Bidpai (circa 300 CE), and in the medieval period, Marie de France (c. 1200 CE) composed 102 fables in verse. After the 1600s, fables increasingly became common as a form of children's literature. See also allegory, beast fable, and parable.
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Entertainment / Literature / Beast Fable: A short, simple narrative with speaking animals as characters designed to teach a moral or social truth. Examples include the fables of Aesop and Marie de France, Kipling's Jungle Books and Just So St MORE