Kinds of Stories

Extracts From "A Dictionary of Literary Terms" by Martin Gray

FABLE
(Lat. 'discourse') A short tale conveying a clear moral lesson in which the characters are animals acting like human beings. The stories attributed to the Greek slave Aesop (sixth century BC) are the earliest and most famous fables; some have entered the language as clichés or proverbial expressions (the fox and the sour grapes, for example). George Orwell's political satire Animal Farm (1945) is a modern example of an extended fable.

Links to Aesop's Fables:
About Aesop at Wikipedia
Online Collection
University of Virginia Library, Electronic Text

PARABLE
(Gk. 'comparison, proverb') A short narrative devised so as to give a clear (but not necessarily explicit) demonstration of a moral or lesson. Christ's favourite method of teaching; there are many examples in the Gospels. The parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-7), for instance, is an illustration of what Christ meant by 'Love thy neighbour'.

LEGEND
(Lat. 'what is read') Originally legends were collections of the lives of the saints, especially the thirteenth-century Legenda Aurea ('Golden Legend'). The word now means a story, or a group of stories, about a heroic personage - not a god (for such stories would be myths) but a historical or semi-historical character such as King Arthur, Robin Hood or Rob Roy. Legends of this kind, in spite of the word's derivation are part of the oral tradition, being the subject matter for songs and ballads, and developing quickly about any popular folk hero or heroine.

MYTH
(Gk. 'word, fable') Myths are stories, usually concerning super humans or gods, which are related to accompany or to explain religious beliefs: they originate far back in the culture of oral societies. A mythology is a system of mythical stories which, taken together, elaborate the religious or metaphysical beliefs of a society. Such a system is likely to contain rituals. In its weakest sense the word 'myth' may mean no more than 'untruth' ("It is a myth that ....."). With reference to religion the word suggests a certain detachment; a mythology is a religion which is no longer felt to be true. To discuss 'Christian mythology', then is to take up a certain point of view about Christianity.
    Writers of almost all ages have valued myths and used them for literary purposes long after the stories have ceased to have any religious content. Romantic 'Primitivism' resulted in a vastly increased interest in mythology in the nineteenth century which culminated in attempts to systematise different mythologies from all over the world. Sir James Frazer's anthropological study of magic, The Golden Bough, started appearing in 1890, and in the twentieth century Jung's theories of 'Archetypal Symbols' and the 'Collective Unconscious' rely heavily on the study of mythology. More recently 'Structuralist' critics have seen mythology as a kind of language for communicating ideas, significant not for its content but for the structure of its systems. Another contemporary development has been myth criticism by (among others) the Canadian Northrop Frye, who expounded the view that all literature is based on myths, in particular myths explaining the cycle of the seasons and different phases of the agricultural year. Different genres belong to different seasons: comedy to spring, romance to summer, tragedy to autumn and irony to winter. Even the most sophisticated literature can be seen in this way to express recurrent archetypes and plots.
    Writers have used myths in many different ways. The flexibility of the stories allow a single myth to be remodelled in many different forms. Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1820) is such a reworking. Many writers such as Blake and Yeats, have created their own elaborate systems of mythology. Others, such as Joyce in Ulysses (1922) and Eliot in The Waste Land (1922), have placed myths alongside views of modern society in an ironic parallel or contrast.
    In recent criticism the word tends to lose its connection with religion and is used to describe the complete range of systems and signs by which a society expresses its cultural values. The French structuralist Roland Barthes, for example, in his collection of essays called Mythologies (1957), analyses phenomena such as wrestling, the can-can dance and car design, in order to reveal aspects of French culture and society.