This well-written, academic account of the presence of tricksters in nineteenth-century literature delivers a straightforward argument regarding the influence of African American artistic practices on the “white canon,” particularly the white Southern canon. The central premise of the book is that well-known texts, including Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, among others, were influenced by the “black aesthetic technique” of the trickster figure and its formal characteristics. The effort suggests that these well-known white authors observed and then implemented black storytelling techniques in ways that are first identified here. According to the author, “the impact of black folklore in the white literary imagination of the nineteenth century [is] an area of inquiry that remains on the critical margins” (6). While too much stress is placed on this supposed marginality, the book makes a real contribution to our reckoning of the source of formal techniques that are...
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