Trickster Lives Culture and Myth in American Fiction [Hardcover]

JEANNE CAMPBELL REESMAN is a professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is the author of American Designs: The Late Novels of James and Faulkner and Jack London: A Study of the Short Fiction. Her other books include Trickster Lives and Speaking the Other Self (both Georgia).

At once criminal and savior, clown and creator, antagonist and mediator, the character of trickster has made frequent appearances in works by writers the world over. As Margaret Atwood observed, trickster gods "stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands; they operate where things are joined together and, thus, can also fall apart." A shaping force in American literature, trickster has appeared in such characters as Huckleberry Finn, Rinehart, Sula, and Nanapush. Usually a figure both culturally specific and transcendent, trickster leads the way to the unconscious, the concealed, and the seemingly unattainable.

Trickster Lives offers thirteen new and challenging interpretations of trickster in American writing, including essays on works by African American, Native American, Pacific Rim, and Latino writers, as well as an examination of trickster politics. This innovative collection of work conveys the trickster’s unmistakable imprint on the modern world.

Lively essays explore the cross-cultural origins and significance of the trickster in American literatureTrickster Lives represents a significant new perspective on American literature,as well as an important contribution to trickster scholarship, not simply because it contains excellent original essays on both well-known and lesser-known works, but because its interdisciplinary approach broadens our sense of what literary studies can be.For analysis and argument about trickster in Native Hawaiian texts, Brer Rabbit tales, l3u