The Worldview of Modern American Proverbs

There was a time when the word "modern" would not have appeared in folklore scholarship in general and in proverb studies in particular. After all, folklorists and cultural historians were primarily interested in traditional materials with some consideration also being given to their innovative adaptations. While this interplay of tradition and innovation informed many studies that exemplified a certain constancy in change, little attention was paid to new or modern folklore items. But there has been a revolutionary change during the past few decades in that scholars have looked at the creation of new folklore. This change of emphasis has also influenced paremiographers (proverb collectors) and paremiologists (proverb scholars). In fact, the Dictionary of Modern Proverbs (2012) edited by Charles Clay Doyle, Wolfgang Mieder, and Fred R. Shapiro has become solid proof that there is such a phenomenon as modern proverbs.

This is the first study of authentic modern American proverbs without including proverbs of British origin. The first of nine chapters discusses the origin, nature, and meaning of modern American proverbs based on about 1500 texts. The next large chapter contains a general overview of their forward-looking message that includes the American spirit of mobility with its emphasis toward a successful and exciting future. The third chapter treats proverbial emotions about modern life, with the fourth chapter considering the modern wisdom about age and aging. The next two chapters cover somatic aspects of these proverbs and also the preoccupation with time. This is followed by a discussion about pecuniary proverbs that reflect the attitudes of a capitalistic society. The next chapter shows that modern proverbs continue to include references to animals as has been the case with older proverbs. Finally, there is the ninth chapter about sexuality and scatology in modern proverbs, indicating that these topics play a considerable role in this modern wisdom. Such proverbs were often excluded form proverb collections. With the much greater openness about love, sex, and various taboos, proverbs have become much more open literally or figuratively about these matters that are an obsession of sorts throughout the society. Altogether these nine chapters with their many modern American proverbs present a fascinating metaphorical picture of a general of composite American worldview.

Autorentext

Wolfgang Mieder is University Distinguished Professor of German and Folklore at the University of Vermont, where he served for thirty-one years as chairperson of the Department of German and Russian. He is an internationally acknowledged proverb scholar, the author of the two-volume International Bibliography of Paremiology and Phraseology (2009), and the founding editor of Proverbium: Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship (since 1984). His numerous books and articles are concerned with cultural, folkloristic, historical, linguistic, literary, philological, social, and political topics. Among his more recent books are "Proverbs Speak Louder Than Words": Folk Wisdom in Art, Culture, Folklore, History, Literature, and Mass Media (2008), "Making a Way Out of No Way": Martin Luther King's Sermonic Proverbial Rhetoric (2010), "Behold the Proverbs of a People": Proverbial Wisdom in Culture, Literature, and Politics (2014), and "Right Makes Might": Proverbs and the American Worldview (2019).