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73-614: The Br'er Rabbit stories can be traced back to trickster figures in Africa, particularly the hare that figures prominently in the storytelling traditions in West , Central , and Southern Africa . Among the Temne people in Sierra Leone , they tell children stories of a talking rabbit. Other regions of Africa also tell children stories of talking rabbits and other animals. These tales continue to be part of

146-622: A printer's devil for his newspaper The Countryman . Harris worked for clothing, room, and board. The newspaper reached subscribers throughout the Confederacy during the Civil War ; it was considered one of the larger newspapers in the South, with a circulation of about 2,000. Harris learned to set type for the paper, and Turner allowed him to publish his own poems, book reviews, and humorous paragraphs. Turner's instruction and technical expertise exerted

219-508: A column formerly written by Samuel W. Small , who had taken leave from the paper. In these character sketches, Remus would visit the newspaper office to discuss the social and racial issues of the day. By 1877, Small had returned to the Constitution and resumed his column. Harris did not intend to continue the Remus character. But when Small left the paper again, Harris reprised Remus. He realized

292-489: A habit of truancy. Harris excelled in reading and writing, but was mostly known for his pranks, mischief, and sense of humor. Practical jokes helped Harris cloak his shyness and insecurities about his red hair, Irish ancestry, and illegitimacy, leading to both trouble and a reputation as a leader among the older boys. At the age of 14, Harris quit school to work. In March 1862, Joseph Addison Turner, owner of Turnwold Plantation nine miles east of Eatonton, hired Harris to work as

365-485: A king who wants to find the best groom for his daughter by ordering several trials. No brave and valiant prince or knight manages to win them, until a poor and simple peasant comes. With the help of his wits and cleverness, instead of fighting, they evade or fool monsters, villains and dangers in unorthodox ways. Against expectations, the most unlikely candidate passes the trials and receives the reward. {{Citation needed|date=November 2024]] More modern and obvious examples of

438-721: A lesson, punching and head butting the rabbit, the stuck rabbit being swung around and around) are reminiscent of those found in a Zimbabwe-Botswana folktale. Folklorists in the late 19th century first documented evidence that the American versions of the stories originated among enslaved West Africans based on connections between Br'er Rabbit and Leuk , a rabbit trickster in Senegalese folklore. Stories of Br'er Rabbit were written down by Robert Roosevelt , an uncle of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt . Theodore Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography about his aunt from Georgia that "she knew all

511-595: A literary journal. Just six months after that, homesick, he returned to Georgia, but with another opportunity at the Monroe Advertiser , a weekly paper published in Forsyth, Georgia . At the Advertiser Harris found a regional audience with his column "Affairs of Georgia." Newspapers across the state reprinted his humorous paragraphs and political barbs. Harris' reputation earned him the position of associate editor at

584-451: A novel called Tar Baby . Such a character appears in a folktale recorded by Harris. In interviews, Morrison said she learned the story from her family and owed no debt to him. Scholars have questioned the authenticity of his main works, citing the difficulty that many white folklorists had in persuading African Americans to divulge their folklore. But, others note the similarity of African folk stories in several sources that are similar to

657-418: A particularly vitriolic period. In 1904 Harris wrote four important articles for The Saturday Evening Post discussing the problem of race relations in the South; these highlighted his progressive yet paternalistic views. Of these, Booker T. Washington wrote to him: It has been a long time since I have read anything from the pen of any man which has given me such encouragement as your article has. ... In

730-663: A profound influence on Harris. During his four-year tenure at Turnwold Plantation, Joel Harris consumed the literature in Turner's library. He had access to Chaucer , Dickens , Sir Thomas Browne , Arabian Nights , Shakespeare , Milton , Swift , Thackeray , and Edgar Allan Poe . Turner, a fiercely independent Southern loyalist and eccentric intellectual, emphasized the work of southern writers, yet stressed that Harris read widely. In The Countryman Turner insisted that Harris not shy away from including humor in his journalism. While at Turnwold Plantation, Harris spent hundreds of hours in

803-510: A speech on Lincoln's Birthday which I am to deliver in New York, I am going to take the liberty to quote liberally from what you have said. Two years later, Harris and his son Julian founded what would become Uncle Remus's Home Magazine . Harris wrote to Andrew Carnegie that its purpose would be to further "the obliteration of prejudice against the blacks, the demand for a square deal, and the uplifting of both races so that they can look justice in

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876-497: A total of six (out of nine) surviving past childhood. By the late 1890s, Harris was tired of the newspaper grind and suffered from health problems, likely stemming from alcoholism. At the same time, he grew more comfortable with his creative persona. Harris retired from the Constitution in 1900. He continued experimenting with novels and wrote articles for outlets such as The Saturday Evening Post . Still, he remained close to home, refusing to travel to accept honorary degrees from

949-735: A vision of the New South with the editor Henry W. Grady (1880–1889), which stressed regional and racial reconciliation after the Reconstruction era ; as Joel Chandler Harris, fiction writer and folklorist, he wrote many ' Brer Rabbit ' stories from the African-American oral tradition. Joel Chandler Harris was born in Eatonton, Georgia , in 1848 to Mary Ann Harris, an Irish immigrant. His father, whose identity remains unknown, abandoned Mary Ann shortly after Harris' birth. The parents had never married;

1022-413: A white man, he swiftly subsided into the fifth rank. Keith Cartwright, however, asserts, "Harris might arguably be called the greatest single authorial force behind the literary development of African American folk matter and manner." In 1981 the writer Alice Walker accused Harris of "stealing a good part of my heritage" in a searing essay called "Uncle Remus, No Friend of Mine". Toni Morrison wrote

1095-456: Is a direct interpretation of Yoruba tales of Hare, though some others posit Native American influences as well. The scholar Stella Brewer Brookes asserts, "Never has the trickster been better exemplified than in the Br'er Rabbit of Harris." Br'er Rabbit was accompanied by friends and enemies, such as Br'er Fox, Br'er Bear, Br'er Terrapin, and Br'er Wolf. The stories represented a significant break from

1168-610: Is an adaptation of the Ananse stories of the Akan people. Some scholars have suggested that in his American incarnation, Br'er Rabbit represented the enslaved Africans who used their wits to overcome adversity and to exact revenge on their adversaries, the white slave owners. Though not always successful, the efforts of Br'er Rabbit made him a folk hero . Several elements in the Brer Rabbit Tar Baby story (e.g., rabbit needing to be taught

1241-718: The Savannah Morning News , the largest circulation newspaper in Georgia. Though he relished his position in Forsyth, Joe Harris accepted the $ 40-a-week job, a significant pay increase, and quickly established himself as Georgia's leading humor columnist while at the Morning News . In 1872 Harris met Mary Esther LaRose, a seventeen-year-old French-Canadian from Quebec. After a year of courtship, Harris and LaRose married in April 1873. LaRose

1314-605: The Atlanta Constitution , Joe Harris laid out his editorial ideology and set the tone for an agenda that aimed to help reconcile issues of race, class, and region: "An editor must have a purpose. ... What a legacy for one's conscience to know that one has been instrumental in mowing down the old prejudices that rattle in the wind like weeds." Harris served as assistant editor and lead editorial writer at The Atlanta Constitution primarily between 1876 and 1900. He published articles intermittently until his death in 1908. While at

1387-475: The Constitution , Harris, "in thousands of signed and unsigned editorials over a twenty-four-year period, ... set a national tone for reconciliation between North and South after the Civil War". Throughout his career, Harris actively promoted racial reconciliation as well as African-American education, suffrage, and equality. He regularly denounced racism among southern whites, condemned lynching , and highlighted

1460-823: The University of Pennsylvania and Emory College (now Emory University ). In 1905 Harris was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters . Harris traveled to accept an invitation to the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt . Two years earlier, Roosevelt had said, "Presidents may come and presidents may go, but Uncle Remus stays put. Georgia has done a great many things for the Union, but she has never done more than when she gave Mr. Joel Chandler Harris to American literature." On July 3, 1908, Joel Chandler Harris died of acute nephritis and complications from cirrhosis of

1533-681: The fairy tales of the Western tradition: instead of a singular event in a singular story, the critters on the plantation existed in an ongoing community saga, time immemorial. The Uncle Remus stories garnered critical acclaim and achieved popular success well into the 20th century. Harris published at least twenty-nine books, of which nine books were compiled of his published Uncle Remus stories, including Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880), Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892), The Tar Baby and Other Rhymes of Uncle Remus (1904), Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories of

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1606-455: The 'Br'er Rabbit' stories, and I was brought up on them. One of my uncles, Robert Roosevelt, was much struck with them, and took them down from her dictation, publishing them in Harper's , where they fell flat. This was a good many years before a genius arose who, in 'Uncle Remus', made the stories immortal." Some stories were also adapted by Joel Chandler Harris (1845–1908) for white audiences in

1679-461: The 1930s reveals that there were many slaves who fit the Uncle Remus mold. The author Ralph Ellison was positive about Harris' work: Aesop and Uncle Remus had taught us that comedy is a disguised form of philosophical instruction; and especially when it allows us to glimpse the animal instincts lying beneath the surface of our civilized affectations. Some 21st-century scholars have argued that

1752-455: The 20th and 21st Centuries has been mixed, as some accused him of appropriating African-American culture. Critic H. L. Mencken held a less than favorable view of Harris: Once upon a time a Georgian printed a couple of books that attracted notice, but immediately it turned out that he was little more than an amanuensis for the local blacks—that his works were really the products, not of white Georgia, but of black Georgia. Writing afterward as

1825-523: The American South. Rudyard Kipling wrote in a letter to Harris that the tales "ran like wild fire through an English Public school. ... [We] found ourselves quoting whole pages of Uncle Remus that had got mixed in with the fabric of the old school life." The Uncle Remus tales have since been translated into more than forty languages. James Weldon Johnson called the collection "the greatest body of folklore America has produced". Early in his career at

1898-539: The Brer Rabbit manner. The difficulties in obtaining printed sources on the African languages may have inhibited these aspects of critical treatment. Some critical scholars cite Uncle Remus as a problematic and contradictory figure: sometimes a mouthpiece for white paternalism, sometimes a stereotype of the black entertainer, and sometimes poetically subversive. Julius Lester , a black folklorist and university professor, sees

1971-558: The Brer Rabbit tales as published, which represent a folk genre. Examples include the Ila language Sulwe mbwakatizha Muzovu ("Hare makes the elephant afraid") in Smith & Dale The Ila-Speaking Peoples of Northern Rhodesia volume 2, page 309. In the totally unrelated Kanuri or Bornuese culture in Northern Nigeria, such tales as a Fable of Jackal and a Hyena display similar themes quite in

2044-475: The Caribbean via the slave trade), the spider (see Anansi ) is often the trickster. In southern African a ǀKaggen is often the trickster, usually taking the form of a praying mantis . The trickster is a term used for a non-performing "trick maker"; they may have many motives behind their intention but those motives are not largely in public view. They are internal to the character or person. The clown on

2117-554: The Chinese internet character Grass Mud Horse ( cǎonímǎ 草泥马) a trickster candidate because of its duplicity in meaning. Cuffe argues the Grass Mud Horse serves to highlight the creative potential of the trickster archetype in communicating experiential understanding through symbolic narrative. The Grass Mud Horse relies on the interpretative capacity of storytelling in order to skirt internet censorship while simultaneously commenting on

2190-571: The Great Basin . According to Crow (and other Plains) tradition, Old Man Coyote impersonates the Creator: "Old Man Coyote took up a handful of mud and out of it made people". He also bestowed names on buffalo, deer, elk, antelopes, and bear. According to A. Hultkranz, the impersonation of Coyote as Creator is a result of a taboo, a mythic substitute to the religious notion of the Great Spirit whose name

2263-564: The Old Plantation (1905), Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit (1907). The last three books written by Joel Chandler Harris were published after his death which included Uncle Remus and the Little Boy (1910), Uncle Remus Returns (1918), and Seven Tales of Uncle Remus (1948). The tales, 185 in sum, became immensely popular among both black and white readers in the North and South. Few people outside of

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2336-470: The South had heard accents like those spoken in the tales, and the dialect had never been legitimately and faithfully recorded in print. To Northern and international readers, the stories were a "revelation of the unknown." Mark Twain noted in 1883, "in the matter of writing [the African-American dialect], he is the only master the country has produced." The stories introduced international readers to

2409-430: The South then there is no other conceivable solution and there is nothing ahead but political chaos and demoralization." Harris's editorials were often progressive in content and paternalistic in tone. He was committed to the "dissipation of sectional jealousy and misunderstanding, as well as religious and racial intolerance", yet "never entirely freed himself of the idea that the [southern whites] would have to patronize

2482-534: The Uncle Remus stories as important records of black folklore . He has rewritten many of the Harris stories in an effort to elevate the subversive elements over the purportedly racist ones. Regarding the nature of the Uncle Remus character, Lester said, There are no inaccuracies in Harris's characterization of Uncle Remus. Even the most cursory reading of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writer's Project of

2555-768: The Uncle Remus tales satirized the very "plantation school" that some readers believed his work supported. Critic Robert Cochran noted: "Harris went to the world as the trickster Brer Rabbit, and in the trickster Uncle Remus he projected both his sharpest critique of things as they were and the deepest image of his heart's desire." Harris omitted the Southern plantation house, disparaged the white Southern gentleman, and presented miscegenation in positive terms. He violated social codes and presented an ethos that would have otherwise shocked his reading audience. These recent acknowledgements echo early observations from Walter Hines Page , who wrote in 1884 that Harris "hardly conceals his scorn for

2628-420: The [southern blacks]." Harris also oversaw some of The Atlanta Constitution ' s most sensationalized coverage of racial issues, including the 1899 torture and lynching of Sam Hose , an African-American farm worker. Harris resigned from the paper the following year, having lost patience for publishing both "his iconoclastic views on race" and "what was expected of him" at a major southern newspaper during

2701-426: The boy was named Joel after his mother's attending physician, Dr. Joel Branham. Chandler was the name of his mother's uncle. Harris remained self-conscious of his illegitimate birth throughout his life. A prominent physician, Dr. Andrew Reid, gave the Harris family a small cottage to use behind his mansion. Mary Harris worked as a seamstress and helped neighbors with their gardening to support herself and her son. She

2774-467: The cause of other characters' discomfiture, but they are left untouched. Shakespeare 's Puck is an example of this. Another once-famous example was the character Froggy the Gremlin on the early USA children's television show "Andy's Gang". A cigar-puffing puppet, Froggy induced the adult humans around him to engage in ridiculous and self-destructive hi-jinks. For example, many European fairy tales have

2847-468: The changing social and economic values in the South during Reconstruction. Harris's turn as a local colorist gave voice to poor white characters and demonstrated his fluency with different African-American dialects and characters. Harris' books exerted a profound influence on storytellers at home and abroad, yet the Uncle Remus tales effectively have no critical standing. His legacy is, at the same time, not without controversy: Harris' critical reputation in

2920-627: The character Br'er Rabbit in the 1870s, the Br'er Rabbit cycle had been recorded earlier among the Cherokees : The " tar baby " story was printed in an 1845 edition of the Cherokee Advocate , the same year Joel Chandler Harris was born. Algonquin Nations in Eastern North America similarly depict rabbits and hares as cunning and witty. Many stories of rabbits' or hares' wit include connections to

2993-410: The culture hero, Coyote appears in various mythic traditions, but generally with the same magical powers of transformation, resurrection, and "medicine". He is engaged in changing the ways of rivers, creating new landscapes and getting sacred things for people. Of mention is the tradition of Coyote fighting against monsters. According to Wasco tradition, Coyote was the hero to fight and kill Thunderbird ,

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3066-763: The enslaved population during the 18th and 19th centuries. It is impossible to ascertain whether the Cherokee story independently predated the African American story. In a Cherokee tale about the briar patch, "the fox and the wolf throw the trickster rabbit into a thicket from which the rabbit quickly escapes." There was a "melding of the Cherokee rabbit-trickster ... into the culture of African slaves." There are nine books by Joel Chandler Harris that contain Brer Rabbit stories: There are eight books by Enid Blyton that are collections of stories featuring Brer Rabbit and friends, most of which appeared in various magazines in

3139-534: The experience of censorship in China. In this sense Cuffe proposes the Grass Mud Horse trickster as 'a heuristic cultural function to aid the perceiver to re-evaluate their own experiential understanding against that of their communities. By framing itself against and in spite of limits the trickster offers new coordinates by which one can reassess and judges one's own experiences.' Joel Chandler Harris Joel Chandler Harris (December 9, 1848 – July 3, 1908)

3212-576: The face without blushing." Circulation reached 240,000 within one year, making it one of the largest magazines in the country. Harris wrote novels, narrative histories, translations of French folklore, children's literature, and collections of stories depicting rural life in Georgia. The short stories " Free Joe and the Rest of the World ", "Mingo", and "At Teague Poteets" are the most influential of his non-Uncle Remus creative work. Many of his short stories delved into

3285-632: The first fish weir out of logs and branches. Wakdjunga in Winnebago mythology is an example of the trickster archetype. Wisakedjak (Wìsakedjàk in Algonquin , Wīsahkēcāhk(w) in Cree and Wiisagejaak in Oji-Cree ) is a trickster figure in Algonquin and Chipewyan Storytelling. The Coyote mythos is one of the most popular among western Native American cultures, especially among indigenous peoples of California and

3358-748: The house and hired the architect George Humphries to transform the farmhouse into a Queen Anne Victorian in the Eastlake style . The home, soon thereafter called The Wren's Nest , was where Harris spent most of his time. Harris preferred to write at the Wren's Nest. He published prodigiously throughout the 1880s and 1890s, trying his hand at novels, children's literature, and a translation of French folklore. Yet he rarely strayed from home and work during this time. He chose to stay close to his family and his gardening. Harris and his wife Essie had seven more children in Atlanta, with

3431-460: The importance of higher education for African Americans, frequently citing the work of W.E.B. Du Bois in his editorials. In 1883, for example, the New York Sun had an editorial: "educating the negro will merely increase his capacity for evil." The Atlanta Constitution editorial countered with: if "education of the negro is not the chief solution of the problem that confronts the white people of

3504-521: The killer of people, but he could do that not because of his personal power, but due to the help of the Spirit Chief. In some stories, Multnomah Falls came to be by Coyote's efforts; in others, it is done by Raven. More often than not Coyote is a trickster, but always different. In some stories, he is a noble trickster: "Coyote takes water from the Frog people... because it is not right that one people have all

3577-406: The late 1930s. Trickster In mythology and the study of folklore and religion , a trickster is a character in a story ( god , goddess , spirit, human or anthropomorphisation ) who exhibits a great degree of intellect or secret knowledge and uses it to play tricks or otherwise disobey normal rules and defy conventional behavior. Tricksters, as archetypal characters, appear in

3650-435: The late 19th century. Harris invented Uncle Remus , an ex-slave narrator, as a storyteller and published many such stories that had been passed down by oral tradition. He claimed his stories were "the first graphic pictures of genuine negro life in the South." Harris also attributed the birth name Riley to Br'er Rabbit. Harris heard these tales in Georgia. Very similar versions of the same stories were recorded independently at

3723-526: The literary value of the stories he had heard from the slaves of Turnwold Plantation. Harris set out to record the stories and insisted that they be verified by two independent sources before he would publish them. He found the research more difficult given his professional duties, urban location, race and, eventually, fame. On July 20, 1879, Harris published "The Story of Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox as Told by Uncle Remus" in The Atlanta Constitution . It

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3796-470: The liver. In his obituary, the New York Times Book Review echoed Roosevelt's sentiment, stating: "Uncle Remus cannot die. Joel Chandler Harris has departed this life at the age of 60 ... but his best creation, [Uncle Remus] with his fund of folk-lore, will live in literature." Harris created the first version of the Uncle Remus character for The Atlanta Constitution in 1876 after inheriting

3869-474: The mischief-maker is Loki , who is also a shapeshifter . Loki also exhibits sex variability, in one case even becoming pregnant. According to "The Song of Hyndla" in The Poetic Edda , Loki becomes a mare who later gives birth to Odin's eight-legged horse Sleipnir . In African-American folklore, a personified rabbit, known as Brer Rabbit , is the main trickster figure. In West Africa (and thence into

3942-635: The modern Euro-American moral tradition". In some stories the Native American trickster is foolish and other times wise. He can be a hero in one tale and a villain in the next. In many Native American and First Nations mythologies, the Coyote spirit ( Southwestern United States ) or Raven spirit ( Pacific Northwest ) stole fire from the gods ( stars , moon , and/or sun ). Both are usually seen as jokesters and pranksters. In Native American creation stories, when Coyote teaches humans how to catch salmon, he makes

4015-484: The most sacred ceremonies for fear that they forget the sacred comes through upset, reversal, surprise. The trickster in most native traditions is essential to creation, to birth. Native American tricksters should not be confused with the European fictional picaro . One of the most important distinctions is that "we can see in the Native American trickster an openness to life's multiplicity and paradoxes largely missing in

4088-537: The myths of many different cultures. Lewis Hyde describes the trickster as a "boundary-crosser". The trickster crosses and often breaks both physical and societal rules: Tricksters "violate principles of social and natural order, playfully disrupting normal life and then re-establishing it on a new basis." Often, this bending and breaking of rules takes the form of tricks and thievery. Tricksters can be cunning or foolish or both. The trickster openly questions, disrupts and mocks authority. Many cultures have tales of

4161-468: The newspaper appointment, Harris began writing the Uncle Remus stories as a serial to "preserve in permanent shape those curious mementoes of a period that will no doubt be sadly misrepresented by historians of the future." The tales were reprinted across the United States, and Harris was approached by publisher D. Appleton and Company to compile them for a book. Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings

4234-504: The other hand is a persona of a performer who intentionally displays their actions in public for an audience. While the trickster crosses various cultural traditions, there are significant differences between tricksters from different parts of the world: Many native traditions held clowns and tricksters as essential to any contact with the sacred . People could not pray until they had laughed, because laughter opens and frees from rigid preconception. Humans had to have tricksters within

4307-475: The plantation with worthless Confederate money and very few possessions. He lived for a period at The Marshall House . The Macon Telegraph hired Harris as a typesetter later that year. Harris found the work unsatisfactory and himself the butt of jokes around the office, in no small part due to his red hair. Within five months, he accepted a job working for the New Orleans Crescent Monthly ,

4380-642: The same time by the folklorist Alcée Fortier in southern Louisiana , where the Rabbit character was known as Compair Lapin in Creole . It has been argued that Beatrix Potter based her Peter Rabbit tales on Brer Rabbit. In a detailed study of the sources of Joel Chandler Harris's "Uncle Remus" stories, Florence Baer identified 140 stories with African origins, 27 stories with European origins, and 5 stories with Native American origins. Although Joel Chandler Harris collected materials for his famous series of books featuring

4453-691: The slave quarters during time off. He was less self-conscious there and felt his humble background as an illegitimate, red-headed son of an Irish immigrant helped foster an intimate connection with the slaves. He absorbed the stories, language, and inflections of people like Uncle George Terrell, Old Harbert, and Aunt Crissy. The African-American animal tales they shared later became the foundation and inspiration for Harris's Uncle Remus tales. George Terrell and Old Harbert in particular became models for Uncle Remus, as well as role models for Harris. Joseph Addison Turner shut down The Countryman in May 1866. Joel Harris left

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4526-458: The traditional folklore of numerous peoples throughout those regions. In the Akan traditions of West Africa, the trickster is usually the spider Anansi , though the plots in his tales are often identical with those of stories of Br'er Rabbit. However, Anansi does encounter a tricky rabbit called "Adanko" ( Asante-Twi to mean "Hare") in some stories. The Jamaican character with the same name "Brer Rabbit"

4599-575: The trickster archetype include Bugs Bunny , the Cheshire Cat from Lewis Caroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , Jerry from Tom and Jerry , Joker from the Batman series and Pippi Longstocking . In online environments, there has been a link between the trickster and Internet trolling . Some have said that a trickster is a type of online community character. Anthropologist James Cuffe has called

4672-468: The trickster, a crafty being who uses tricks to get food, steal precious possessions, or simply cause mischief. In some Greek myths Hermes plays the trickster. He is the patron of thieves and the inventor of lying, a gift he passed on to Autolycus , who in turn passed it on to Odysseus . In Slavic folktales, the trickster and the culture hero are often combined. Frequently the trickster figure exhibits gender and form variability. In Norse mythology

4745-511: The trickster, shapeshifter sometimes referred to as Nanabozho . In "That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community" by Jace Weaver, the origins of Br'er Rabbit and other literature are discussed. Although the Cherokee had lived in isolation from Europeans in the remote past, a substantial amount of interaction was to occur among North American tribes, Europeans, and those from

4818-399: The water." In others, he is malicious: "Coyote determined to bring harm to Duck. He took Duck's wife and children, whom he treated badly." In modern literature, the trickster survives as a character archetype, not necessarily supernatural or divine, sometimes no more than a stock character . Often, the trickster is distinct in a story by their acting as a sort of catalyst; their antics are

4891-477: Was 18, and Harris 27 (though publicly admitting to 24). Over the next three years, the couple had two children. Their life in Savannah came to an abrupt halt, however, when they fled to Atlanta to avoid a yellow fever epidemic. In 1876 Harris was hired by Henry W. Grady at The Atlanta Constitution , where he would remain for the next 24 years. He worked with other journalists including Frank Lebby Stanton , who

4964-463: Was an American journalist and folklorist best known for his collection of Uncle Remus stories. Born in Eatonton, Georgia , where he served as an apprentice on a plantation during his teenage years, Harris spent most of his adult life in Atlanta working as an associate editor at The Atlanta Constitution . Harris led two professional lives: as the editor and journalist known as Joe Harris, he supported

5037-436: Was an avid reader and instilled in her son a love of language: "My desire to write—to give expression to my thoughts—grew out of hearing my mother read The Vicar of Wakefield ." Dr. Reid also paid for Harris' school tuition for several years. In 1856, Joe Harris briefly attended Kate Davidson's School for Boys and Girls, but transferred to Eatonton School for Boys later that year. He had an undistinguished academic record and

5110-415: Was in turn an associate of James Whitcomb Riley . Chandler supported the racial reconciliation envisioned by Grady. He often took the mule-drawn trolley to work, picked up his assignments, and brought them home to complete. He wrote for the Constitution until 1900. In addition, he published local-color stories in magazines such as Scribner's , Harper's , and The Century . Not long after taking

5183-502: Was published near the end of 1880. Hundreds of newspapers reviewed the best-seller, and Harris received national attention. Of the press and attention Walter Hines Page noted, "Joe Harris does not appreciate Joel Chandler Harris." Royalties from the book were modest, but allowed Harris to rent a six-room house in West End , an unincorporated village on the outskirts of Atlanta, to accommodate his growing family. Two years later Harris bought

5256-543: Was the first of 34 plantation fables that would be compiled in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880). The stories, mostly collected directly from the African-American oral storytelling tradition , were revolutionary in their use of dialect, animal personages, and serialized landscapes. Remus' stories featured a trickster hero called Br'er Rabbit (Brother Rabbit), who used his wits against adversity, though his efforts did not always succeed. Br'er Rabbit

5329-516: Was too dangerous and/or sacred to use apart from at special ceremonies. In Chelan myths, Coyote belongs to the animal people but he is at the same time "a power just like the Creator, the head of all the creatures." while still being a subject of the Creator who can punish him or remove his powers. In the Pacific Northwest tradition, Coyote is mostly mentioned as a messenger, or minor power. As

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