San Antonio College Library

"The trickster and the hero, found in so many of the world's oral traditions, are seemingly opposed but often united in one character. Trickster and Hero provides a comparative look at a rich array of world oral traditions, folktales, mythologies, and literatures--from The Odyssey, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and Beowulf to Native American and African tales. Award-winning folklorist Harold Scheub explores the "Trickster moment," the moment in the story...

"Coyote at Large shatters the misconception that nature writing - works that seem limited to expressing conventional awe, reverence, piety, and wonder - is a humorless genre. In this important and engaging study, Edward Abbey, Louise Erdrich, Wendell Berry, and Rachel Carson, whom the author dubs "comic moralists," command center stage. The trickster-coyote of Native American mythology appears in playful interludes, roaming at large through the prose...

This book explores relationships among African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-British narratives of slavery and of New World and British oppression and what African influences brought to these diasporic expressions. It examines the work of Pan-African trickster icons, such as Leuk (rabbit), Golo (monkey), Bouki (hyena), Mbe (tortoise), and Anancy (spider), on the resistance strategies of early black writers who were exposing the evils of slavery,...

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...