Product Description

"Art is a lie that tells the truth." - Pablo Picasso. Picasso disrupted the world around him, and in doing so he reshaped it. That is the Trickster spirit. Playful, mischievous, subversive, and amoral. Tricksters are a great bother to have around, but paradoxically they are also indispensable heroes of culture, because our world - with its complexity and ambiguity, its beauty and its dirt - was trickster's creation, and the work is not yet finished. Authoritative in its scholarship, supple and dynamic in its style, "Trickster Makes This World" encourages you to think and see afresh.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #78278 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Review
'Hyde displays his own tricksterish qualities in this absorbing hymn to the disrupter of the status quo.' --Observer

Review
'Hyde is persuasive and is at his most interesting on contemporary tricksters.'

About the Author
Lewis Hyde was born in Boston and studied at the Universities of Minnesota and Iowa. In addition to Trickster Makes This World, he is the author of The Gift, a defence of the importance of creativity in our increasingly money-orientated society. Editor of On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg and The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau, Hyde is now writing a defence of the 'cultural commons', that vast store of ideas and art we have inherited from the past. A MacArthur Fellow and former Director of Creative Writing at Harvard, Hyde is currently the Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College in Ohio.

Customer Reviews

deluded
the book promised interesting since it apparently delt with the lives of artists. There is barely a mention of the trickster artists. The book is a dull continuim of analysis of tribal fables.