Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art - Softcover

Hyde, Lewis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374532559 ISBN 13: 9780374532550

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010

Synopsis

Lewis Hyde's ambitious and captivating Trickster Makes This World brings to life the playful and disruptive side of the human imagination as it is embodied in the trickster mythology. Most at home on the road or at the twilight edge of town, tricksters are consummate boundary-crossers, slipping through keyholes, breaching walls, subverting defense systems. Always out to satisfy their inordinate appetites, lying, cheating, and stealing, tricksters are a great bother to have around, but paradoxically they are also indispensable culture heroes. In North America, Coyote taught the race how to dress, sing, and shoot arrows. In West Africa, Eshu discovered the art of divination so that suffering humans might know the purposes of heaven. In Greece, Hermes the Thief invented the art of sacrifice, the trick of making fire, and even language itself. Hyde revisits these old stories, then holds them up against the life and work of more recent creators: Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frederick Douglass, and others.

About this title

Review:

"[A] hymn to the gods of mischief, who are also the gods of artistic and cultural renewal." --Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

"A major work of scholarship that is also a major work of art." --Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University

"Brilliant . . . By the time [Hyde] is done he has folded language culture, and the very habit of being human into his ken." --The New Yorker

"Hyde is one of our true superstars of nonfiction." --David Foster Wallace

"[Trickster Makes This World] should be ready by anyone interested in the grand and squalid matter of all things human." --Margaret Atwood, Los Angeles Times

From the Author:

Description of the TRICKSTER book.
Here is the description of my TRICKSTER book, as it appears in the publisher's catalog. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art An enchanting investigation into the significance of trickster figures, old and new. Lewis Hyde's ambitious and captivating TRICKSTER MAKES THIS WORLD brings to life the playful and disruptive side of human imagination as it is embodied in the trickster mythology. Most at home on the road or at the twilight edge of town, tricksters are the consummate boundary-crossers, slipping through keyholes, breaching walls, subverting defense systems. Always out to satisfy their inordinate appetites, lying, cheating, and stealing, tricksters are a great bother to have around, but paradoxically they are also indispensable culture heroes. In North America, Coyote taught the race how to dress, sing and shoot arrows. In West Africa, Eshu discovered the art of divination so that suffering humans might know the purposes of heaven. In Greece, Hermes the Thief invented the art of sacrifice, the trick of making fire, and even language itself. Hyde revisits these old stories then holds them up against the life and work of more recent creators: Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frederick Douglass and others. The old myths say that the trickster made the world as it actually is. Other gods set out to create a world more perfect and ideal, but THIS world with its complexity and ambiguity, its beauty and its dirt, was trickster's creation, and the work is not yet finished. -- Lewis Hyde / Kenyon College

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0374532559
• ISBN 13: 9780374532550
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432