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Myth and literature in modernity : a question of priority

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Bell, Michael (2011) Myth and literature in modernity : a question of priority. Publications of the English Goethe Society, Vol.80 (No.2-3). pp. 204-215. doi:10.1179/095936811X12997586789575

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/095936811X12997586789575

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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.

Item Type: Journal Article
Subjects: P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
Divisions: Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): Literature and myth, Modernism (Literature)
Journal or Publication Title: Publications of the English Goethe Society
Publisher: Maney Publishing
ISSN: 09593683
Official Date: 2011
Dates:
DateEvent
2011Published
Volume: Vol.80
Number: No.2-3
Number of Pages: 12
Page Range: pp. 204-215
DOI: 10.1179/095936811X12997586789575
Status: Peer Reviewed
Publication Status: Published

Data sourced from Thomson Reuters' Web of Knowledge

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