This book is the first volume in the Garland Folklore Casebook series. It contains 20 essays on various aspects of proverb studies. These 20 essays touch upon the major concerns of paremiology, and they are representative results of the trends and themes of modem proverb scholarship.

1. The Perception of Proverbiality 2. Foundations of Semiotic Proverb Study 3. The Linguistic Status of the Proverb 4. Analogic Ambiguity: A Paradox of Proverb Usage 5. Do Proverbs Contradict? 6. Proverbial Per locutions: How to Do Things with Proverbs 7. Psychological Approaches to Proverbs: A Treatise on the Import of Context 8. Slurs International: Folk Comparisons of Ethnicity and National Character 9. Proverbs and Social History 10. Bruegel's Proverb Painting: Renaissance Art for a Humanist Audience 11. Paremiological Minimum and Cultural Literacy 12. The Pragmatics of Proverb Performances in New Mexican Spanish 13. Chamula Tzotzil Proverbs: Neither Fish nor Fowl 14. Proverb Performance in the Hebrew Bible 15. The Literary Use of Proverbs 16. Telling It Slant: Emily Dickinson and the Proverb 17. The Fable and the Proverb: Intertexts and Reception 18. "When Adam Delved . . .”: Contexts of an Historic Proverb 19. “The Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side of the Fence": An American Proverb of Discontent 20. Proverbs in Graffiti: Taunting Traditional Wisdom