A moral is a message conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. The moral may be left to the hearer, reader or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim. As an example of the latter, at the end of Aesop's fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, in which the plodding and determined tortoise wins a race against the much-faster yet extremely arrogant hare, the moral is "slow and steady wins the race. Aesop's Fables or Aesopica refers to a collection of Fables credited to Aesop (620&ndash 560 BC) a slave and story-teller who lived The Tortoise and the Hare is a Fable attributed to Aesop. French poet Jean de La Fontaine adapted into the poem "le lièvre et la "

The use of stock characters is a means of conveying the moral of the story by eliminating complexity of personality and so spelling out the issues arising in the interplay between the characters, enabling the writer to make clear the message. A stock character is one which relies heavily on cultural types or names for his or her personality manner of speech and other characteristics With more rounded characters, such as those typically found in Shakespeare's plays, the moral may be more nuanced but no less present, and the writer may point it up in other ways (see, for example, the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet. William Shakespeare ( baptised A play, or stageplay, is a form of Literature written by a Playwright, almost always consisting of Dialogue between Fictional characters Prologue ( Greek πρόλογος prologos, from προ~ pro~ - fore~, and lógos word) or prolog, is a prefatory Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written early in the )

Throughout the history of recorded literature, the majority of fictional writing has served not only to entertain but also to instruct, inform or improve their audiences or readership. In classical drama, for example, the role of the chorus was to comment on the proceedings and draw out a message for the audience to take away with them; while the novels of Charles Dickens are a vehicle for morals regarding the social and economic system of Victorian Britain. The theatre of ancient Greece, or ancient Greek drama, is a theatrical Culture that flourished in ancient Greece between c The Greek chorus ( choros) is believed to have grown out of the Greek Dithyrambs and Tragikon drama in tragic plays of the ancient A novel (from Italian novella, Spanish novela, French nouvelle for "new" "news" or "short story Victorian morality is a distillation of the moral views of people living at the time of Queen Victoria (reigned 1837 - 1901 in particular and to the moral climate

Morals have typically been more obvious in children's literature, sometimes even being introduced with the phrase, "The moral of the story is …". Children's literature is an age category of literature written for published for or marketed to Children roughly through age 12 Such explicit techniques have grown increasingly out of fashion in modern storytelling, and are now usually only included for ironic purposes. Irony is a literary or Rhetorical device, in which there is an incongruity or Discordance between what one says or does and what one means or As Oscar Wilde observes wryly, The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900 was an Irish Playwright, Novelist, poet and Author of That is what Fiction means. ^[1]

Some examples are: "Better be safe than sorry", "The evil deserves no aid", "Be friends with whom you don't like", "Don't judge people by the way they look", "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me" and "Slow and steady wins the race".

References

1. ^ [1] Accessed 30 October 2006.