Definition: A short allegorical narrative making a moral point, traditionally by means of animal characters who speak and act like human beings.
Expanded Definition: What Is a Fable?
Expanded Definition: What Is a Fable?
Also Known As: apologue
Examples:
- In Aesop's fable called "The Ants and the Grasshopper" we are taught that industriousness is a virtue and the lazy often go without their supper.
- "In the first place, the fable must exhibit the animals as being endowed with human reason, and initiated into all the customs and conditions of our mode of living, so that their behavior has nothing at all odd in it." -- Jacob Grimm
