Writing Tricksters

Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Fiction

Jeanne Rosier Smith

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• ISBN:
  9780520323391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Writing Tricksters examines the remarkable resurgence of tricksters—ubiquitous shape-shifters who dwell on borders, at crossroads, and between worlds—on the contemporary cultural and literary scene. Depicting a chaotic, multilingual world of colliding and overlapping cultures, many of America's most successful and important women writers are writing tricksters. Taking up works by Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich, and Toni Morrison, Jeanne Rosier Smith accessibly weaves together current critical discourses on marginality, ethnicity, feminism, and folklore, illuminating a "trickster aesthetic" central to non-Western storytelling traditions and powerfully informing American literature today. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• CHAPTER ONE The Trickster Aesthetic
• CHAPTER TWO Monkey Business
• CHAPTER THREE Comic Liberators and Word-Healers
• CHAPTER FOUR Tar and Feathers
• Conclusion
• NOTES
• WORKS CITED
• INDEX