Books in the International Folkloristics series

The book is both a continuation of "Widespread Idioms in Europe and Beyond" (2012) and differs from it by new insights into the similarities of the European languages. Using comprehensive data from 77 European and some non-European languages, another 250 "widespread idioms" have been analyzed in terms of their distribution and origins.

The Transatlantic Culture Trade: Caribbean Creole Proverbs from Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean celebrates indigenous Caribbean Creole languages and one of their associated cultural vectors, Creole proverbs.

Suitable for academic teaching and further research in the fields of phraseology and figurative language, areal and contact linguistics, and European cultural studies, this book answers significant questions regarding hitherto vague ideas about the phraseological similarities between European languages and their cultural foundation.

By re-examining the gender-specific behaviors of both the animal-woman and her human spouse, this book recovers the sociocultural and historical contexts that underlay their behaviors to demonstrate the actual gender characteristics that shaped the original Japanese Animal-Wife tales, highlighting the assertive, rather than naive, personality of women in early Japanese folktale tradition.

This unique Festschrift in honor of Professor Kevin J. McKenna on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday consists of a collection of fourteen of his most significant publications on proverbial matters from the last two decades. For more than twenty-five years, Professor McKenna has taught Russian language, culture, and literature at the University of Vermont.

From sales pitch to propagandistic tool, the author looks at how we adapt proverbs to change social attitudes - the original wording of proverbs changes to fit modern advertising slogans or political rhetoric and late medieval woodcuts illustrating proverbs to find their modern equivalents in political cartoons and comic strips.

Comprises a survey of the multifaceted nature of proverbs as colorful expressions of folk wisdom. This book deals with the definition and classification of proverbs, including such matters as proverb markers and meanings, origin and dissemination, traditional forms related to proverbs, and types of proverb collections.

Two Thousand Zhuang Proverbs from China provides an important corpus for the study of the Zhuang ethnic group by scholars, students, and others who are interested in Zhuang language, culture, folklore and oral traditions, and proverbs.

Dagara Verbal Art examines verbal art among the Dagara people of West Africa.

In Contexts of Folklore, leading lights of folklore studies from many corners of the globe honor folklorist Dan Ben-Amos-recognized for his paradigm-shifting definition of folklore as "artistic communication in small groups"-by presenting original studies inspired by his insights.

This is the first study of authentic modern American proverbs without including proverbs of British origin. It discusses the origin, nature, and meaning of modern American proverbs based on about 1500 texts.