Myth and Literature in Modernity: A Question of Priority

Author: Bell, Michael

Source: Publications of the English Goethe Society, Volume 80, Numbers 2-3, July 2011 , pp. 204-215(12)

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Abstract:

The modernist turn to myth is well known but little understood. Yeats, Joyce, Lawrence, and Thomas Mann reinvented in practice a model of mythopoeia mooted theoretically by both Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Schelling in 1800. The modernists did not typically articulate their mythopoeia philosophically, although Nietzsche had done this for them and provided a link with German thought on myth and aesthetics. The aesthetic becomes the modern equivalent of myth: literature assumes the function of myth. But the self-conscious aesthetic bracketing in modernist mythopoeia was not widely understood. And so there is a tradition running through the reception of T. S. Eliot and the theory of Northrop Frye which assimilated literature to myth, presenting literature as the secular articulation of an offstage religious world-view. Although 'myth criticism' of that kind has now largely faded from the Anglophone academy, another version has appeared in common understandings of 'magical realism'. Myth is a 'repressed' which will always return if its essentially literary status is not recognized.

Keywords: MYTHOPOEIA; MYTH; LITERATURE AND HISTORY; ENLIGHTENMENT; AESTHETICS; MODERNISM; REASON

Document Type: Research Article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/095936811X12997586789575

Affiliations: University of Warwick, UK

Publication date: 2011-07-01

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