Article one surveys the figures the category covers; the category itself has a history worth telling separately. "Trickster" as a technical term in comparative mythology is generally traced to Daniel Brinton's writing on Native American myth in the 1860s, and it was Franz Boas's rigorous ethnographic fieldwork, followed by his student Paul Radin's full-length study of the Winnebago cycle, that gave the term the scholarly weight it still carries.
The category has also been criticised for lumping together figures that do rather different work. Some, Coyote and Raven prominently, are primarily culture heroes who happen to blunder; others, Loki above all, drift over time from mischief toward genuine malice; and treating all of them as one psychological type, as Jung's archetype reading tends to, can flatten those differences rather than explain them.
The term's most consequential modern afterlife is literary rather than anthropological. Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s The Signifying Monkey (1988) built a theory of African American literary tradition directly on the West African trickster Esu-Elegbara, carried into diaspora vernacular as the Signifying Monkey, arguing that a specific rhetorical practice of indirection and double meaning in Black literature descends from Esu's own function as the interpreter who stands between fixed meanings. That argument moved the trickster concept out of comparative religion and into literary theory as a working critical tool, which is a considerably further journey than most categories in this collection have made.