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Urban legends are a modern genre of folklore that is rooted in local popular culture, usually comprising fictional stories that are often presented as true, with macabre or humorous elements. These legends can be used for entertainment purposes, as well as semi-serious explanations for seemingly-mysterious events, such as disappearances and ...
Mythic fiction is literature that draws from the tropes, themes, and symbolism of myth, legend, folklore, and fairy tales.It is usually set in the real world and deals with realistic issues, but a mythic atmosphere prevails; however, not all mythic fiction is fantasy, and the fantastic component is not always blatant.
Myth criticism, a discipline that studies myths (mythology contains them, like a pantheon its statues), is by nature interdisciplinary: it combines the contributions of literary theory, the history of literature, the fine arts and the new ways of dissemination in the age of communication.
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 ...
In structuralism-influenced studies of mythology, a mytheme is a fundamental generic unit of narrative structure (typically involving a relationship between a character, an event, and a theme) from which myths are thought to be constructed [1] [2] —a minimal unit that is always found shared with other, related mythemes [citation needed] and reassembled in various ways ("bundled") [3] or ...
The literary collection of Greco-Roman myths with the greatest influence on later Western culture was the Metamorphoses of the Augustan poet Ovid. Syncretized versions form the classical tradition of mythography , and by the time of the influential Renaissance mythographer Natalis Comes (16th century), few if any distinctions were made between ...
Anthropomorphic cat guarding geese, Egypt, c. 1120 BCE. Fable is a literary genre defined as a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized, and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be added explicitly as a concise maxim or ...
Still, anthropologists and literary critics both acknowledge the links between myths and relatively more contemporary literature. Therefore, many literary critics take the same Lévi-Straussian structuralist, as it is coined, approach to literature. This approach is, again, similar to Symbolist critics’ approach to literature. There is a ...