Trickster Tales

Trickster - a mythic figure common among Native North Americans, South Americans, and Africans. Usually male but occasionally female or disguised in female form, he is notorious for exaggerated biological drives and well-endowed physique; partly divine, partly human, and partly animal, he is an often amoral and comic troublemaker. The Winnebago trickster Wakdjunkaga scattered all creation across Read More...

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Trickster Tales

1 .

Trickster in the Land of Dreams
by Zeese Papanikolas. 190 pgs.

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Title Page

Contents

Introduction

1: Dust People

2: Tongues of Fire, Tongues of Gold

3: Dream Mining

4: Cowboys, Wobblies, and the Myth of the West

5: The Road to Oz

6: Mx

7: News from Nowhere

Tailpiece: Coyote's Return

Appendix: Shoshone Myths and Their Retelling

Notes

Index
2 .

The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology
by Paul Radin. 214 pgs.

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Title Page

Contents

Prefatory Note

Part One: The Trickster Myth of the Winnebago Indians

I: The Winnebago Trickster Cycle

II: Notes to Pages 3-53

Part Two: Supplementary Trickster Myths

I: The Winnebago Hare Cycle

II: Notes to Pages 63-91

III: Summary of the Assiniboine Trickster Myth

IV: Summary of the Tlingit Trickster Myth

Part Three: The Nature and the Meaning of the Myth

1: The Text

II: Winnebago History and Culture

III: Winnebago Mythology and Literary Tradition

IV: The Winnebago Hare Cycle and Its Cognates

V: The Winnebago Trickster Figure

VI: The Attitude of the Winnebago toward Wakdjunkaga

VII: The Wakdjunkaga Cycle as a Satire

VIII: The Wakdjunkaga Cycle and Its Relation to Other North American Indian Trickster Cycles

Part Four: The Trickster in Relation to Greek Mythology

1: First Impressions

II: Style

III: Parallels

IV: Nature of the Trickster

V: His Difference from Hermes

Part Five: On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure

On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure
3 .

Scheherazade's Sisters: Trickster Heroines and Their Stories in World Literature
by Marilyn Jurich. 294 pgs.

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Title Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1: Mean and Meaningful Tricks

2: Folktale Females in Patriarchal Systems

3: The Rescuer

4: The Pursuer

5: The Empowered

6: The Province of Tricksterdom

Overview of Tales: Chapters 1-5

Bibliography

Index
4 .

From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom
by John W. Roberts. 233 pgs.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

One: Introduction

Notes

Two: Br'Er Rabbit and : Trickster Heroes in Slavery

Notes

Three: The Power Within: The Conjurer as Folk Hero

Notes

Four: Christian Soldiers All: Spirituals as Heroic Expression

Notes

Five: "You Done Me Wrong": The Badman as Outlaw Hero

Notes

Six: Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index
5 .

Folk Poetics: A Sociosemiotic Study of Yoruba Trickster Tales
by Ropo Sekoni, Henry Louis Gates. 141 pgs.

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Of all the different sub-genres of oral prose fiction among the Yoruba of Nigeria, the trickster tale is the most popular, especially among the nonruling stratum of society. Sekoni describes and explains literally what makes the trickster tale a trickster tale. The focus is to establish the phenomenology of the trickster tale discourse from a sociosemiotic perspective. More specifically, Sekoni attempts to investigate the sociological and narratological conditions that govern the formation, transformation, and persistence of the trickster tale primarily among the Yoruba masses and secondarily among contemporary Yoruba authors writing in English.

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Contents

Preface

1: Features of Yoruba Trickster Tale Aesthetics

2: The Trickster as Folk Hero: Aesthetics of Negation

3: The Trickster as Villain: Aesthetics of Affirmation

4: Current Trends in the Use of Trickster Tale Discourse

5: Conclusion

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

About the Author
6 .

Before the Great Spirit: The Many Faces of Sioux Spirituality (Chap. Three "Tricksters")
by Julian Rice. 178 pgs.

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Title Page

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Orthographic Notes

Chapter One: Introduction

Chapter Two: Warriors

Chapter Three: Tricksters

Chapter Four: Heroes

Chapter Five: Symbols

Chapter Six: Games

Chapter Seven: Thunders

Chapter Eight: Heyokas

Chapter Nine: Walker

Chapter Ten: Spirits

Chapter Eleven: Conclusion

Works Cited

Index
7 .

The Folktale (Chap. III "The Trickster Cycle")
by Stith Thompson. 510 pgs.

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Title Page

Preface

Table of Contents

Part One: Nature and Forms of the Folktale

I: Universality of the Folktale

II: Forms of the Folktale

Part Two: The Folktale from Ireland to India

I: Ireland to India: Peoples and Lands

II: The Complex Tale

III: The Simple Tale

IV: The Folktale in Ancient Literature

V: European-Asiatic Folktales in Other Continents

Part Three: The Folktale in a Primitive Culture---North American Indian

I: The North American Indian Tales

II: Creation Myths

III: The Trickster Cycle

IV: Test and Hero Tales

V: Journeys to the Other World

VI: Animal Wives and Husbands

VII: Miscellaneous American Indian Tales

Part Four: Studying the Folktale

I: Theories of the Folktale

II: International Organization of Folktale Study

III: Collecting Folktales

IV: Classifying Folk Narrative

V: The Life History of a Folktale

VI: The Folktale as Living Art

Appendix A: Important Works on the Folktale

Appendix B: Principal Collections of Folktales

Index of Tale Types

Index of Motifs

General Index
8 .

Our Living Traditions: An Introduction to American Folklore (Chap. 15 "Trickster, the Outrageous Hero")
by Tristram Potter Coffin. 301 pgs.

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Our Living Traditions: An Introduction to American Folklore

Preface

The Authors

Contents

I Folklore as a Field for Study

1: A Definition of Folklore

2: The Men Who Made Folklore a Scholarly Discipline

3: Harvesting Folklore

4: Ways of Studying Folklore

5: Folklife

6: Where the Workers of the World Unite: The American Occupations

7: Tributaries to the Mainstream: The Ethnic Groups

Ii Areas of Focus

8: Stories Told in Song: The Ballads of America

9: "Just Sing It Yourself": The American Lyric Tradition

10: The Glory Songs of the Lord

11: The Music of the Songs

12: "Honor Your Ladies": Folk Dance in the United States

13: Magic Folktales in America

14: Legends and Tall Tales

15: Trickster, the Outrageous Hero

16: The Folk Games of the Children

17: "The Wisdom of Many": Proverbs and Proverbial Expressions

18: Riddles: "Do-It- Yourself Oracles"

19: "The Fear of the Gods": Superstition and Popular Belief

20: Folk Speech

21: American Literature and American Folklore

Iii Folklore and Modern Times

22: The Workers in the Dawn: Labor Lore

23: The Hillbilly Movement

24: Negro Music: Urban Renewal

25: Folklore and the Big Money

Index
9 .

Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom ("The Fate of the Trickster" begins on p. 370)
by Lawrence W. Levine. 524 pgs.

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Preface

Acknowledgments

Contents

1: The Sacred World of Black Slaves

2: The Meaning of Slave Tales

3: Freedom, Culture, and Religion

4: The Rise of Secular Song

5: Black Laughter

6: A Pantheon of Heroes

Epilogue

Notes

Index
10 .

Escaped Tricksters: Runaway Narratives as Trickster Tales, in Griot
by Alexis Brooks De Vita. 10 pgs.

Journal Article

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11 .

Imagination, Conversation, and Trickster Discourse: Negotiating an Approach to Native American Literary Culture, in American Indian Quarterly
by Paul L. Tidwell. 12 pgs.

Journal Article

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12 .

Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook ("Native American Coyote Trickster Tales and Cycles" begins on p. 155)
by Vicki K. Janik, Emmanuel S. Nelson. 552 pgs.

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Jesters and fools have existed as important and consistent figures in nearly all cultures. Sometimes referred to as clowns, they are typological characters who have conventional roles in the arts, often using nonsense to subvert existing order. But fools are also a part of social and religious history, and they frequently play key roles in the rituals that support and shape a society's system of beliefs. This reference book includes alphabetically arranged entries for approximately 60 fools and jesters from a wide range of cultures. Included are entries for performers from American popular culture, such as Woody Allen, Charlie Chaplin, and the Marx Brothers; literary characters, such as Shakespeare's Falstaff, Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Singer's Gimpel; and cultural and mythological figures, such as Birbal, the American circus clown, the Native American Coyote, Taishu Engeki of Japan, Hephaestus, Loki the Norse fool, schlemiels and schlimazels, and the drag queen.

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Title Page

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Notes

Woody Allen: The Clown as Tragic Hero

The Anthropology of Fools

Notes

Robert Armin

Notes

Archy Armstrong

The Badin

Lucille Ball

Jean-Louls Barrault

Critical Reception

Beckett's Postmodern Clowns: Vladimir (Didi), Estragon (Gogo), Pozzo, and Lucky

Jack Benny

Birbal

Selected Bibliographv

The Bishop of Fools

Note

George Burns and Gracie Allen the Jewish Vaudeville Tradition

The Camp

Canio-Pagliacco and Petrouchka: Two Contrasting Images of Pierrot

Charlie Chaplin

The American Circus Clown

Commedia Dell'Arte

Selected Bibliograph

Native American Coyote Trickster Tales and Cycles

Notes

The Drag Queen

Sir John Falstaff

Feste

W. C. Fields

Folly in the Enduring Tradition

The Fop: Apes and Echoes of Men": Gentlemanly Ideals and the Restoration

Notes

Gimpel

Joseph Grimaldi

Notes

Forrest Gump: Innocent Fool

Hamlet

Hephaestus, Hermes, and Prometheus: Jesters to the Gods

Note

The Heyoka of the Sioux

Clowns of the Hopi

Selected Bibiliography

Knaves and Fools in Ben Jonson

Buster Keaton

William Kemp

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy Yin and Yang

Lear's Fool: (England: in William Shakespeare's King Lear: 1605

Loki, the Norse Fool

The Marx Brothers

Selecteid Bibliograpy

Notes

Merry Report

Paul the Apostle

Notes

Penasar of Bali: Sacred Clowns

Note

Pierrot: Dramatic and Literary Mask

Plautus's Clowns

Puck/Robin Goodfellow

Punch and Judy

FrançOis Rabelais

Martha Raye

Rigoletto

Schlemiels and Schlimazels

The Sleary Circus

Socrates as Fool in Aristophanes and Plato

Note

Will Sommers

The Sottie, the Sots, and the Fols

South African Political Clowning Laughter and Resistance to Apartheid

Ciritical Reception

Country Squires and Bumpkins

Selected Bibliographv

The Three Stooges

Taishu Engeki: Subverting the Patterns of Japanese Culture

Note

The Tarot Fool

The Tarot Fool in English and American Novels

Touchstone

The Vice Figure in Middle English Morality Plays

The Vice in Henry Medwall's Nature

Mae West

The Yankee

Zanni

Critical Reception

Selected General Bibliography

Index

About the Editor and Contributors
13 .

Disorderly Discourse: Narrative, Conflict, & Inequality ("The Trickster's Scattered Self" begins on p. 53)
by Charles L. Briggs. 248 pgs.

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Involving everything from war to playground disputes, narratives generate, sustain, mediate, and represent conflict at levels of social organization. Still, despite the vast amount of research that has been conducted on conflict and narrative in a number of disciplines, the way they interrelate has seldom been explored in any depth; in fact, most studies treat narrative merely as a source of information about conflict rather then as a part of conflict processes. The contributors to this collection argue that language consists of socially and politically situated practices that are differentially distributed on the basis of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and other categories. They draw on new approaches to the study of both discourse and political processes in challenging previous assumptions about narrative and social conflict as they interpret disputes that emerge in a variety of settings in Brazil, Fiji, Crete, Mexico, the United States, and Venezuela. These essays substantially further our theoretical and methodological understanding of narrative and conflict and how they intersect.

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Title Page

Contents

Contributors

Introduction

Notes

Telling Troubles Narrative, Conflict, and Experience

Works Cited

The Trickster's Scattered Self

Notes

Embarrassment as Pride Narrative Resourcefulness and Strategies of Normativity Among Cretan Animal-Thieves

Notes

Works Cited

Detective Stories at Dinnertime Problem Solving Through Co-Narration

Works Cited

Ideological Dissonance in the American Legal System

Works Cited

Consensus and Dissent in U.S. Legal Opinions Narrative Structure and Social Voices

Works Cited

"We Want to Borrow Your Mouth" Tzotzil Marital Squabbles

Works Cited

Conflict, Language Ideologies, and Privileged Arenas of Discursive Authority in Warao Dispute Mediation

Works Cited

Index
14 .

Child's Play: Myth, Mimesis and Make-Believe (Chap. 5 "The Trickster: A Melanesian Enantiomorph")
by L. R. Goldman. 306 pgs.

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This innovative book finally takes seriously the need for anthropologists to produce in-depth ethnographies of children's play. In examining the subject from a cross-cultural perspective, the author argues that our understanding of the way children transform their environment to create make-believe is enhanced by viewing their creations as oral poetry. The result is a richly detailed 'thick description' of how pretence is socially mediated and linguistically constructed, how children make sense of their own play, how play relates to other imaginative genres in Huli life, and the relationship between play and cosmology.Informed by theoretical approaches in the anthropology of play, developmental and child psychology, philosophy and phenomenology and drawing on ethnographic data from Melanesia, the book analyzes the sources for imitation, the kinds of identities and roles emulated, and the structure of collaborative make-believe talk to reveal the complex way in which children invoke their experiences of the world and re-invent them as types of virtual reality. Particular importance is placed on how the figures of the ogre and trickster are articulated. The author demonstrates that while the concept of 'imagination' has been the cornerstone of Western intellectual traditions from Plato to Postmodernism, models of child fantasy play have always intruded into such theorizing because of children's unique capacity to throw into relief our understanding of the relationship between representation and reality.

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Title Page

Explorations in Anthropology A University College London Series

Contents

Foreword

Bibliography

Preface

Transcription Conventions

Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter 1 Naming and Gaming

Chapter 2 Pretend Play

Introduction

Conclusions

Introduction

Chapter 3 Changing Roles

Conclusion

Introduction

Chapter 4 the Ogre: a Melanesian Cyclop

Introduction

Chapter 5 the Trickster: a Melanesian Enantiomorph

Afterword

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Bibliography

Index

Books	Journals	Magazines
Newspapers	Encyclopedia	Research Topics

Books	Journals	Magazines
Newspapers	Encyclopedia	Research Topics

Trickster Tales

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