A beast fable, also called an animal tale, is a short story or poem in which animals talk and sometimes exhibit other human-like qualities such as living in a human-like society, forming a traditional mode of allegorical writing. It is distinguished from fable more broadly by its universal frame of reference: rather than depicting a specific human social context, a beast fable explores relationships in universal terms of how animal species relate to one another, such as a predator wishing to eat its prey, an abstraction that lets readers of different cultures and eras grasp its characters' motivations and has made the form especially suited to cross-cultural transmission and moral instruction.
Facts
Place of OriginAncient Greece, via the Aesopica attributed to Aesop 1 A parallel, independently attested beast-fable tradition also runs through the Panchatantra in India (circa 300 BCE); this key names only the western/Aesopic line to keep one unambiguous fact. Notable ExampleAesop's The Tortoise and the Hare 1 Defining TraitAn animal tale, the beast fable's defining form, includes talking animals as characters, usually acting to convey a moral. 1 Connections
Features Author
Source Kalila wa Dimna (Wikipedia)
In the Other Atlases
Originated In
Also in Geography Atlas: where this subject originated.
Source Fable (Wikipedia)tier 2
Sources
1. Fable (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationTerminology section
an animal tale specifically includes talking animals as characters.
Greece section
The varying corpus denoted Aesopica or Aesop's Fables includes most of the best-known western fables, which are attributed to the legendary Aesop.
India section
The Panchatantra is an ancient Indian assortment of fables. The earliest recorded work, ascribed to Vishnu Sharma, dates to around 300 BCE.
Aesopica list
Many familiar fables of Aesop include "The Crow and the Pitcher", "The Tortoise and the Hare" and "The Lion and the Mouse".
In Group: Fables and Moral Tales, Lead section
Fable is a literary genre defined as a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphised, and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be added explicitly as a concise maxim or saying.
View the Source Kalila wa Dimna (Wikipedia)
Features Author: Kalila wa Dimna, LeadQuote, Features Author: Kalila wa Dimna, Lead
a collection of interconnected animal fables
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