As the fabulist Suniti Namjoshi observes, there is something very visual about the fable genre: ‘a fabulist is someone who can conjure a powerful image, [which is] often an animal’.  It is then no surprise that the fable tradition is rich in illustration – animal imagery, evoked by storytelling, is an integral part of its appeal. This also makes, by implication, the animals we encounter consummate fabulists, unparalleled in their ability to impress us with images of themselves.

It is interesting to think about how the rise of modern visual technology – photography, film, and TV – has impacted the fable tradition, reshaping it and emerging as a new medium of fable as visual storytelling. Brett Mills’ talk, ‘Television as a Moral Storyteller’, given at our first workshop in June 2023, is a great introduction to this question, as he explores the roles of television in representing animals, whether through animal characters in children’s cartoons or wildlife documentaries.

Brett Mills is Honorary Professor of Media and Culture at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is the author of Animals on Television: The Cultural Making of the Non-Human (2017). He was a member of the team for the AHRC-funded research projects, ‘Multispecies Storytelling: More-Than-Human Narratives About Landscape’ (2019-22) and ‘Multisensory Multispecies Storytelling to Engage Disadvantaged Groups in Changing Landscapes’ (2020-22). He is member of the Culivian: Culturas Literarias y Visuales del Animal Research Group at the University of Valencia, Spain.