The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight

Robert D. Pelton is a scholar of religion, and this University of California Press book is his academic study of the trickster figure in West African mythology, focusing on Ananse the spider and related trickster figures, reading their stories for what he argues is a coherent religious logic of irony and sacred disruption rather than treating trickster tales as simple comic folklore. Its strength is sustained close reading of the actual trickster narratives themselves, building an interpretive argument grounded in the stories' own details rather than importing a generic cross cultural trickster theory. Its limit is that Pelton's specific interpretive framework is his own scholarly argument, so a reader should hold his reading of what the trickster figure ultimately means as one respected interpretation rather than the tradition's own single settled understanding of itself.