2130 Literature and Social Change

The ‘Fable’

Most popular, canonized ones today involve animals but not all of them

Often used as a persuasive tool

Aesop

Legendary figure who both wrote and is recorded in fables

Was an enslaved mute man from modern day Turkey who once freed gained a voice

Always presented as an outsider in fables but central to the fable

Outsider status represented in his being from a different place as well as his physical appearance, described as darker skinned and hunchbacked

Often is centered as the moral-giver in fables, adding authority to the fable

Phaedrus

Important fable writer from Roman times who translated Greek fables (and thus Aesop’s fables) into Latin

Was also a freedman and likened himself to Aesop in his fables

Aesop’s Fables

Legendary fables written by Aesop

Have survived through history and act as a basis of the fable genre

Promythium

A form of moral positioning when the moral is explicitly stated at the beginning of the fable

Epimythium

A form of moral positioning when the moral is explicitly stated at the end of the fable

Endomythium

A form of moral positioning where the moral is explicitly stated within the narrative, often by a character