Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, Religion & Mythology in Art, Native American Literature - Literary Criticism, Folklore - General & Miscellaneous, Folklore & Mythology - By Subject
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Overview
In Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde brings to life the playful and disruptive side of human imagination as it is embodied in trickster mythology. He first visits the old stories—Hermes in Greece, Eshu in West Africa, Krishna in India, Coyote in North America, among others—and then holds them up against the lives and work of more recent creators: Picasso, Duchamp, Ginsberg, John Cage, and Frederick Douglass. Twelve years after its first publication, Trickster Makes This World—authoritative in its scholarship, loose-limbed in its style—has taken its place among the great works of modern cultural criticism.
This new edition includes an introduction by Michael Chabon.
Editorials
Michael Dirda
Persuasively celebrates the need for the kind of paintings, music, books and ideas that society initially finds unpleasant. . . [A] hymn to the gods of mischief, who are also the gods of artistic and cultural renewal. -- Washington Post Book WorldMichael Dirda
Persuasively celebrates the need for the kind of paintings, music, books and ideas that society initially finds unpleasant... [A] hymn to the gods of mischief, who are also the gods of artistic and cultural renewal.Sacvan Bercovitch
A major work of scholarship that is also a major work of art.The New Yorker
Brillant... By the time he is done he has folded language, culture, and the very habit of being human into his ken.Guy Davenport
A rich study exploring the paradox that culture is articulated by subversive innovation, Professor Hyde's Trickster Makes This World is a humanist essay written at a time when uniformity calls itself diversity; repression, freedom; and bigotry, patriotism. It can be read as a sustained commentary on the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, or as an inquiry into the sociology of rigidity and flexibility.Book Details
Published
January 1, 1998
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pages
417
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780765524195