A Dictionary of Anglo-American Proverbs & Proverbial Phrases Found in Literary Sources of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries is a unique collection of proverbial language found in literary contexts. It includes proverbial materials from a multitude of plays, (auto)biographies of well-known actors like Britain's Laurence Olivier, songs by William S. Gilbert or Lorenz Hart, and American crime stories by Leslie Charteris. Other authors represented in the dictionary are Horatio Alger, Margery Allingham, Samuel Beckett, Lewis Carroll, Raymond Chandler, Benjamin Disraeli, Edward Eggleston, Hamlin Garland, Graham Greene, Thomas C. Haliburton, Bret Harte, Aldous Huxley, Sinclair Lewis, Jack London, George Orwell, Eden Phillpotts, John B. Priestley, Carl Sandburg, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Jesse Stuart, Oscar Wilde, and more. Many lesser-known dramatists, songwriters, and novelists are included as well, making the contextualized texts to a considerable degree representative of the proverbial language of the past two centuries.
While the collection contains a proverbial treasure trove for paremiographers and paremiologists alike, it also presents general readers interested in folkloric, linguistic, cultural, and historical phenomena with an accessible and enjoyable selection of proverbs and proverbial phrases.
Author Biography:
The Authors: George B. Bryan (1939-1996) was Professor of Theatre History and Wolfgang Mieder is Professor of German and Folklore at the University of Vermont. They are both authors of numerous books and articles on various literary and folkloric topics, among them Bryan's Black Sheep, Red Herrings, and Blue Murder: The Proverbial Agatha Christie (Peter Lang, 1993) and Mieder's No Struggle, No Progress: Frederick Douglass and His Proverbial Rhetoric for Civil Rights (Peter Lang, 2001). Together they have published several books on proverbial matters, including The Proverbial Bernard Shaw (1994), The Proverbial Winston S. Churchill (1995), The Proverbial Eugene O'Neill (1995), Proverbs in World Literature: A Bibliography (Peter Lang, 1996), The Proverbial Harry S. Truman (Peter Lang, 1997), and The Proverbial Charles Dickens (Peter Lang, 1997).
