| This disruption is normal. It is part of what we know is there. Making troublemessing up the orderis part of the order. It fits within the pattern. Referring to a description offered by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Paula Gunn Allen explains that trickster is the presence "who is male and female, many-tongued, changeable, changing and who contains all the meanings possible within her or his consciousness."1 |
| Like trickster, the purpose of this book is disruption. Most scholarship about turn-of-the-century United States literature defines the period in terms of the literary paradigms of realism, naturalism, and modernism. This volume, in contrast, places trickster at the definitional center, a concept not privileged by Eurocentric notions of the real, natural, or modern. In doing so, it suggests a significantly different perspective on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States literature. Multicultural in origin, the concept of trickster offers a way of thinking about the turn of the century that brings into view authors, texts, and traditions ignored until very recently or, if mentioned, denigrated, dismissed, or misunderstood. |
| Perhaps the most obvious problem with the usual academic construction of turn-of-the-century American literature is its narrowness. The terms realism, naturalism, and modernism admit only a very small set of writersas is intended, of course. Henry James and William Dean Howells, along with heirs such as Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Willa Cather, find easy access. The same cannot be said of most writers of color. It is hard, for example, to define Pauline Hopkins as a realist or naturalist, or, given her penchant for exploiting the strategies of the sentimental novel, a modernist, at least in any conventional sense. And what about Sui Sin Far? Or Alice Dunbar-Nelson? W. E. B. Du Bois? Zitkala-Sa*? If James and Howells (or even their forebears Harriet Beecher Stowe and Rebecca Harding Davis) determine the paradigms, then the para- |
|
