AustLit

'The trickster features in a wide range of folkloric, mythic, popular, and literary texts. Spanning antiquity and the contemporary world, tricksters appear in African, Arabic, Asian, Caribbean, European (including Greek, Norse, and Slavic), Pacific, and South American cultures, as well as those of Indigenous peoples in settler nations. Literary trickster figures include the Odyssean wandering hero, the animals in Aesop's fables, the Shakespearean wise fool, and the confidence man in nineteenth-century novels by Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mark Twain. More recently, trickster figures have been deployed across a range of minority literatures. Jeanne Rosier Smith, for example, discusses the trickster's recent resurgence in the fiction of what she terms ethnic American women writers., Trickster figures have also appeared in Indigenous writing from both the USA and Canada. '  (Introduction)