Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

Updated June 26, 2020 | Infoplease Staff

Professor-poet Lewis Hyde is one of those rare creatures able to wed a searching intelligence to rigorous research and convey his findings with elegant, eminently readable prose. In Trickster Makes This World, this MacArthur Fellow spins a delicious argument concerning the trickster character in world mythology and his resonance in the lives of such modern figures as Frederick Douglass, Pablo Picasso, and Allen Ginsberg. From Hermes to Eshu, tricksters walk the line between sacred and profane; they are amoral gods of changing faces and fluid appetites, flagrant boundary-crossers who propel culture by frustrating the logic of its limits. A consummate trickster himself, Hyde transforms cunning scholarship into a celebration of creative dissonance and the disruptive imagination.