Przysłowie, aforyzm, sentencja. Definicje małych form literackich w perspektywie komparatystycznej
Proverb, Aphorism, Maxim: Defining Minor Literary Forms from a Comparative Perspective

Summary/Abstract: Scholars of minor literary forms such as the proverb, maxim or aphorism face the problem definition. To define a genre becomes a necessity especially when it comes to comparing similar forms from different cultural contexts. The difficulty, then, is not only to juxtapose a form’s characteristics and to describe it in a way that would allow us to tell it apart from related forms, but also to label the form. What is called “przysłowie” (proverb) in Polish is known by a variety of terms in different languages; most often these terms derive from the Latin (proverbium) or Greek (paremia). Another complication is related to the fact that scholars of minor literary forms in Spain, for instance, treat paremia as a category that is broader than the proverb. The lack of parallelism and consistency accounts for the abiding confusion about the genre of the proverb.

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