The trickster aesthetic. Narrative strategy and cultural identity in the works of three contemporary United States women writers: Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich, and Toni Morrison

Tricksters, who dwell on borders, at crossroads, and between worlds, prominently appear in recent novels by three contemporary American women of color. Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior and Tripmaster Monkey, Toni Morrison's Tar Baby and Song of Solomon, and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine and Tracks all focus on trickster characters, and incorporate trickster-like elements in their narrative form. While Erdrich, Kingston, and Morrison obviously draw on distinct cultural and historical traditions (Nanabozho, the Monkey King, and Br'er Rabbit share few particularities), the three writers work from a common cultural and historical context--the interconnected, diverse, and often conflicting worlds of contemporary America. For each writer, the trickster embodies the rich paradoxes of inhabiting interconnecting worlds.; My concept of a "trickster aesthetic" links cultural identity and narrative strategy: the trickster's historical roots in social and political engagement, together with his fluidity of form and transgression of boundaries, create a flexible, dynamic, culturally grounded model for reading the novels of the contemporary ethnic American women writers upon whom I concentrate. Combining a postmodern awareness of disjunction, multiplicity, and paradox with a strong folk heritage, the trickster provides a way of laughing at damaging stereotypes and celebrating culture and community. Moreover, the trickster's humor, polyvalence, and multivocality suggest a valuable mode for interaction, on a textual and a personal level, in an increasingly multicultural world.; For the ethnic American women writers in this study, the trickster aesthetic provides a way into cultural specificity, while at the same time allowing a means of escape from essentializing definitions. Precisely because he cannot be pinned down to any one form, shape, or position, and because he continually disrupts the status quo with laughter, jokes, and outrage, the trickster embodies an expansive, dynamic cultural identity rather than a reductive, static one. The resurgence of the trickster on the contemporary literary landscape, and especially in novels by women of color, surely speaks for the figure's importance not only to theme but to stylistic innovation in the contemporary ethnic novel.