[
Moral Fables] is a collection of 89 fables that Giovanni Meli (1740-1815) wrote in Sicilian verse during the last years of his life. It was published for the first time in 1814, except for fables LXIII and LXIV, which had already appeared in the 1787 edition of his works, as well as a long fable contained in the
Don Chisciotti e Sanciu Panza(1785).
The fables were a very congenial genre for Meli, not as a way of escaping an oppressive reality, as Francesco Biondolillo maintained (p. 27), but rather because the fable had grown in popularity across Europe thanks to the work of J. Addison in England, J. La Fontaine in France, and G.E. Lessing in Germany. Meli came to regard the fable as an excellent pedagogical medium to promote a lay and rational view of the world guided by
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Citation: Cipolla, Gaetano. "Favuli morali". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 December 2018 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=38916, accessed 23 November 2024.]
