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Analyzing Chesnutt's fiction from the angle of the West African trickster tradition explains the varying interpretations of his texts and his authorial intentions. The discussion also illustrates the influence that audience and editorial concerns may have had on African-American authors at the turn of the century.

Whereas scholarly malcontents and naifs in late Renaissance drama represent the actual notion of university graduates during the time period, scholarly tricksters have an obscure social origin. Moreover, their lack of motive in participating in the plays' events, their ambivalent value structures, and their conflicting dramatic roles as tricksters, reformers, justices, and heroes pose a serious diffculty to literary critics who attempt to define them. By examining the Western dramatic tradition, this study first proposes that the scholarly tricksters have their origins in both the Vice in early Tudor plays and the witty slave in classical comedy. By incorporating historical, cultural, anthropological, and psychological studies, this essay also demonstrates that the scholarly tricksters are each a Jacobean version of the archetypal trickster, who is usually associated with solitary habits, motiveless intrusion, and a double function as selfish buffoon and cultural hero. Finally, this study shows that their ambivalent value structures reflect the nature of rhetorical training in Renaissance schools.

There has, in the last quarter of a century, been an increased interest in the /Xam narratives that form the major part of the nineteenth century archive of materials collected by Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek in Cape Town from /Xam informants. This has resulted in a proliferation of writing about the Bleek and Lloyd collection and its contents. The critical examination of some of this body of writing forms part of the project of this thesis. The other aim of the thesis is to provide a close reading of certain of the /Xam texts themselves. This thesis is based on the view that the first of these projects has only been attempted in a cursory and indirect fashion and that the second, namely the close reading of/Xam texts, has not yet been undertaken on a scale that parallels the range and complexity of the materials or which exhausts the interpretative possibilities they offer. This thesis aims to fill some of these gaps in the literature without claiming that a comprehensive or definitive study is possible in so wide and rich a field. Postmodern and postcolonial theory has emphasised the discursive and ideological nature of the language of both hermeneutics and literature. In my consideration of the /Xam texts and the writing that has been produced in relation to them, I attempt to consistently foreground the historicity and textuality of my own practice and the practices of the materials with which I am working. In this regard I question, especially, two assumptions about the /Xam narratives: that they are primarily aetiological and that their chief character, /Kaggen, the Mantis, is a trickster. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2006.

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