fable
fable,a term most commonly used in the sense of a short story devised to convey some useful moral lesson, but often carrying with it associations of the marvellous or the mythical, and frequently employing animals as characters. Aesop 's fables and the ‘Reynard the Fox’ series were well known and imitated in Britain by Chaucer , Henryson , and others, and La Fontaine , the greatest of modern fable writers, was imitated by Gay . Mandeville 's The Fable of the Bees, Swift's Gulliver's Travels , and Orwell's Animal Farm may be described as satirical fables. The form enjoyed something of a vogue in the 1920s and 1930s, in works by T. F. Powys , D. Garnett , John Collier , and others, and has always been popular in children's literature.
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