Overview
- Analyses different types of proverb alterations, and highlights common themes in relationship to women in Anglo-American proverb innovations
- Explores how women are seen in the corpus of Anglo-American anti-proverbs in their traditional societal roles (wife, mother, daughter, widow, mother-in-law, grandmother, etc.)
- Draws examples from hundreds of books and articles on puns, one-liners, quotations, aphorisms, maxims, quips, epigrams and graffiti
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About this book
This book examines stereotypical traits of women as they are reflected in Anglo-American anti-proverbs, also known as proverb transformations, deliberate proverb innovations, alterations, parodies, variations, wisecracks, fractured proverbs, and proverb mutations. Through these sayings and witticisms the author delineates the image of women that these anti-proverbs reflect, her qualities, attributes and behavior. The book begins with an analysis of how women’s role in the family, their sexuality and traditional occupations are presented in proverbs, and presents an overview of the genre of the anti-proverb. The author then analyses how this image of women is transformed in anti-proverbs, sometimes subverting, but often reinforcing the sexist bias of the original. This engaging work will appeal to students and scholars of humour studies, paremiology, gender studies, cultural studies, folklore and sociolinguistics alike.
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Keywords
Table of contents (12 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Part I
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Front Matter
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Part II
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“An elegant study of the nexus between social ethos, proverbs and humorous resistance, Anna T. Litovkina’s collection of modern Anglo-American anti-proverbs about women and gender roles shows how humour captures shifts in social power structures over time. It lays out a valuable road map for future studies in other cultures and illustrates the power of humorous challenge and inversion to subvert the proverbial wisdom of the ages.”(Jessica Milner Davis, University of Sydney, Australia)
"A must read on the representation of women in popular culture by a leading scholar in anti-proverbs." (Salvatore Attardo, Texas A&M University-Commerce, USA)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Anna T. Litovkina is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, János Selye University, Slovakia. She is the author of numerous articles and fifteen books on proverbs, including Old Proverbs Never Die, They Just Diversify: A Collection of Anti-Proverbs (with Wolfgang Mieder, 2006), and “Do You Serve Lawyers and Politicians Here?”: Stereotyped Lawyers and Politicians in Anglo-American Jokes and Anti-Proverbs (2016).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Women Through Anti-Proverbs
Authors: Anna T. Litovkina
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91198-4
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-91197-7Published: 15 October 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-08196-6Published: 24 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-91198-4Published: 01 October 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIX, 211
Topics: Sociolinguistics, Language and Gender, Culture and Gender, Women's Studies, American Culture