Description: "Scheherazade's sisters" are those female protagonists in folktales who use trickery to save themselves and others, to find new directions for their lives, and to declare their individuals autonomies, especially in societies that diminish and oppress women. Through strategies that depend on verbal facility, psychological acuity, arid diplomatic finesse these female tricksters -- renamed trickstars -- uncover the absurdity, hypocrisy, and corruption the larger patriarchal society. Through the trickstar's efforts, "the system" is circumvenced or foiled; often enlightened and usually improved. The book is a multi-cultural comparative study which reveals universal human traits as well as gender differences in female and male tricksters and realizes the values and attitudes which shape trickstar's character and behavior.

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