Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms ed. by William J. Hynes, William G. Doty (review)

Reviews 357 Humor is cited with approval (though not always total agreement) in every chapter. Forrest Robinson is Wonham’s straw man, a gull, in his view, without wit enough to follow the play. We finish Wonham’sstudywith a clearer sense ofClemens’saesthetics, how he envisioned narratives and audiences, aswell as thoughtful interpretations of individual texts: particularlyvaluable, Ibelieve, are his readings of TomSawyer(a contest of narrative authorities) and of the always-troubling Pudd'nhead Wilson. CHARLES L. CROW Bowling Green State University Mythical TricksterFigures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms. Edited by WilliamJ. Hynes and William G. Doty. (Tuscaloosa: UniversityofAlabamaPress, 1993. 261 pages, $41.95.) Scholars who choose to write about tricksters mayfind themselves tracking a subjectwho circles back, laughing from behind trees to alert the whole forest to the intruder’sposition. Editors Hynes and Doty do well to abandon the hunt and, instead, to listen at the borderlands where tricksters work their magic. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach which avoids a unified perspective, the editors make it possible for their anthology to reflect the multivocality inherent to tricksters whether in specific cultures or studied cross-culturally. The editors frame the book in such a way as to make it an excellent introduction for those unfamiliar with scholarship on tricksters. A chapter by Hynes and Doty outlining theoretical issues and methodologies informing the history of trickster studies prefaces the more specific essays on tricksters from Greece to Africa, America toJapan. With its extensive bibliography of trickster studies, the book should prove to be a valuable resource for those writing not only on traditional tricksters but also on contemporary ones in the works of Gary Snyder, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gerald Vizenor, and others Hynes men­ tions in his concluding chapter. However, the book’s strength is its reflection of trickster characteristics. The trickster’svitality and flexibility is honored bydialogues which begin early in the book only to be disrupted by following chapters. T. O. Beidelman, for example, tugs at the book’s boundaries by calling for an end to the use of the term “trickster”in cross-cultural contexts in favor ofculture-specific study. And Anne Doueihi discusses the impositions and misreadings of colonialist ap­ proaches to trickster scholarship. The best contributions, such as Robert D. Pelton’s on West African tricksters, are infected with the language of the trickster who invites humans to contemplate “a world large in its intricacy, spiritual in its crude bodiliness, multiple in its ironic wholeness, and finally transcendent in the absurdity of its pretensions.” If some of the contributors 358 Western American Literature seem too determined to define and limit the tricksters they study, the collected voices ofthe anthology finally allow the trickster to slip awayand wander along to the next story. BRADLEYJ. MONSMA University ofSouthern California Narrating Discovery: The Romantic Explorer in American Literature, 1790-1855. By Bruce Greenfield. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. 249 pages, $36.50.) The “romantic explorer[s]” here in question are a pretty diverse bunch, and not altogether “American,”as the title indicates. Three of them—Samuel Hearne, Alexander Mackenzie, and Alexander Henry—did their exploring in Canadian territories, and so may not be asfamiliar as Lewis and Clark, Zebulon Pike, or John Charles Fremont. In addition to these, there are three who we tend to think of, first, as literary figures, and then, incidentally, as explorers: Washington Irving, Thoreau, and Poe. This assembly of the trail-weary and the ink-stained mayseem an unlikelyone, but itactuallyworkswell: on one hand, its inclusiveness will broaden your perspective on the explorations of the North American continent; and on the other hand, the attention it paysto some ofthe secondarywritings ofIrving, Thoreau, and Poe should add to whatyou know of them. The model for this volume is the scholarship of Sacvan Bervcovitch, ac­ knowledged in the introduction, and its critical orientation faces toward the myth/symbolists who have been prominent in the departments of American studies: Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx, Frederick Jackson Turner, R. W. B. Lewis, Perry Miller, and Richard Slotkin, etc. Mentioning this body of scholarship is also a way of defining the sort of study that NarratingDiscoveryis not. I saythis because, when I first sawthe term “narrating”in the...