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  • Behold the Proverbs of a People: Proverbial Wisdom in Culture, Literature, and Politics by Wolfgang Mieder
  • David J. Puglia
Behold the Proverbs of a People: Proverbial Wisdom in Culture, Literature, and Politics. By Wolfgang Mieder. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014. 489 Pp. viii +, introduction, proverb index.)

In culture, literature, and politics, the proverb stands ready to lend a helping hand, shine a light, and make a way out of no way. Today, as for millennia, proverbs matter in human communication, formal and informal. Wise but not true, short but not simple, proverbs capture human wisdom and comment on the human condition through formulaic, authoritative sayings that, in the right situation, for a fleeting moment, appear as astute truths. Studying these elusive bits of wisdom is easier said than done. Wolfgang Mieder, the world's foremost paremiologist, has the awe-inspiring power to root out proverbs in wide-ranging, unexpected haunts, from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, sermon in Detroit to President Barack Obama's address to the Turkish parliament, from Ralph Waldo Emerson's journal jottings to Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and from the scrolls of antiquity to the mouths of his students.

Mieder's fifth essay collection, Behold the Proverbs of a People stands as his greatest and most important work to date. The book's chapters consist of reprints of articles and chapters from various phraseology, proverb, and folklore journals and volumes published between 2007 and 2014, organized thematically and held together by a strong introduction. A couple of the chapters already live second lives as stand-alone monographs that pre-date the publication of Behold the Proverbs of a People: the chapter on President Barack Obama's use of proverbs as "Yes We Can": Barack Obama's Proverbial Rhetoric (Peter Lang, 2009) and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, use of proverbs as "Making a Way Out of No Way": Martin Luther King's Sermonic Proverbial Rhetoric (Peter Lang, 2010).

The book's overriding thesis is that proverbs are evergreen, always "in vogue" (p. 4). Not content with mere identification or static lists, Mieder [End Page 223] connects proverbs to speech acts and evaluates proverbs' strategic roles in written and oral communication in specific cultural contexts. His methods align paremiology neatly with contemporary folkloristics, favoring the analysis of proverbs in context, performance, and communicative and rhetorical situations. The depth and breadth of Mieder's sources are astonishing. Speeches, great works of literature, dictionaries, encyclopedias, almanacs, authors' sketchbooks, letters, television, radio, film, advertisements, magazines, folklore archives, and surveys only scratch the surface of the sources Mieder summons.

Following a useful introduction, the book splits into four sections: general concerns of the field of paremiology, proverbs in politics, proverbs in literature, and detailed studies of particular proverbs. In the first section, "Proverbial Wisdom," Mieder reflects on paremiology itself, presenting the state of the discipline, touching on English language proverbs adopted in foreign languages, and detailing his scholarly expeditions to unearth modern proverbs. The first chapter, "'The Wit of One, and the Wisdom of Many': Proverbs as Cultural Signs of Folklore," offers an overview of modern paremiology beneficial to all folklorists who wish to familiarize themselves with proverb study. "'Many Roads Lead to Globalization': The Translation and Distribution of Anglo-American Proverbs in Europe" traces the importance of English, the new lingua franca, in loaning proverbs to other tongues. "'Think Outside the Box': Origin, Nature, and Meaning of Modern Anglo-American Proverbs" proves that, despite the historical inclination of paremiologists, for proverbs, there is no time like the present. To wit, Mieder offers a behind-the-scenes look at the origin and production of the Dictionary of Modern Proverbs (Yale University Press, 2012).

In the second section, "Proverbs in Politics," Mieder probes the proverbial political world, broadly conceived, combing the public rhetoric of political leaders Martin Luther King, Jr., and President Barack Obama and the proverbial political themes of war, peace, and global engagement, his analysis always returning to proverbs in context, interpretable only as strategies within specific speech acts. "'Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness': Martin Luther King's Proverbial Struggle for Equality" demonstrates how King employed proverbs strategically in the struggle for civil...

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