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A pourquoi story [a] (French pronunciation: ⓘ; "pourquoi" meaning "why" in French) is a fictional narrative that explains why something is the way it is, for example why snakes have no legs or why tigers have striped coats. Many legends, origin myths and folk tales are pourquoi stories.
A less pejorative term is a pourquoi story, which has been used to describe usually more mythological or otherwise traditional examples of this genre, aimed at children. This phrase is a reference to Rudyard Kipling 's 1902 Just So Stories , containing fictional and deliberately fanciful tales for children, in which the stories pretend to ...
Also apophthegm. A terse, pithy saying, akin to a proverb, maxim, or aphorism. aposiopesis A rhetorical device in which speech is broken off abruptly and the sentence is left unfinished. apostrophe A figure of speech in which a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience (e.g., in a play) and directs speech to a third party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes ...
The stories tended to vary from the folk tradition, for example the characters were made to be of genteel origin. [8] Whilst the heroes and heroines of fairy tales written by the précieuses often appeared as shepherds and shepherdesses, in pastoral settings, these figures were often secretly royal or noble.
Cumulative tale This Is the House That Jack Built In a cumulative tale , sometimes also called a chain tale , action or dialogue repeats and builds up in some way as the tale progresses. With only the sparest of plots, these tales often depend upon repetition and rhythm for their effect, and can require a skilled storyteller to negotiate their ...
J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is an example of epic fantasy, [20] though the genre is not limited to the Western tradition, for example: Arabic epic literature includes One Thousand and One Nights; [21] and Indian epic poetry includes Ramayana and Mahabharata.
Perrault's French fairy tales, for example, were collected more than a century before the Grimms' and provide a more complex view of womanhood. But as the most popular, and the most riffed-on, the Grimms' are worth analyzing, especially because today's women writers are directly confronting the stifling brand of femininity
A tall tale is a story with unbelievable elements, related as if it were true and factual. Some tall tales are exaggerations of actual events, for example fish stories ("the fish that got away") such as, "That fish was so big, why I tell ya', it nearly sank the boat when I pulled it in!"