Clowns And Tricksters Book

From Adugo to Zomo, from the funny to the frightening, the most complete collection of clowns and tricksters ever assembled is packed between the covers of this comprehensive volume. In more than 200 fully cross-referenced and indexed entries, Clowns and Tricksters: An Encyclopedia of Tradition and Culture brings these humorous, powerful, greedy, obscene, scary, selfish - and sometimes helpful - creatures to life. Describing these colorful figures by popular name, appearance, and origins, Clowns and Tricksters examines their relationships to their cultures of origin and recounts tales featuring them, while numerous illustrations bring the ragtag assembly to life. This book is an essential aid for students, scholars, authors, and anthropologists - anyone who wants a clearer understanding of how humans use clowns and tricksters to explain who they are and why they do what they do. By revealing an imagined world just on the edge of our own, where creatures very much like us strive and connive and behave and misbehave, Clowns and Tricksters provides a good starting point for anyone who is interested in how we use stories to explain our world.