A book on modern mythology

The Rise of Modern Mythology is a voice of reason in the contemporary maelstrom of international religious violence and American pluralism; more than any book I know, it exposes the roots of the Western appropriation of non-Western mythologies, from Lawrence of Arabia and Omar Khayyam to Tibetan Buddhism in Hollywood and Krishna Consciousness in airports.

The contributors to this collection of essays on the literary use of myth in the early twentieth century and its literary and philosophical precedents from romanticism onwards draw on a range of disciplines, from anthropology, comparative literature, and literary criticism, to philosophy and religious studies. The underlying assumption is that modernist myth-making does not retreat from modernity, but projects a mode of being for the future which the past could serve to define. Modernist myth is not an attempted recovery of an archaic form of life so much as a sophisticated self-conscious equivalent. Far from seeking a return to an earlier romantic valorizing of myth, these essays show how the true interest of early twentieth-century myth-making lies in the consciousness, affirmative as well as tragic, of living in a human world which, in so far as it must embody value, can have no ultimate grounding. Although myth may initially appear to be the archaic counterterm to modernity, it is thus also the paradigm on which modernity has repeatedly reconstructed, or come to understand, its own life forms. The very term myth, by combining, in its modern usage, the rival meanings of a grounding narrative and a falsehood, encapsulates a central problem of modernity: how to live, given what we know.

In this important essay, Joseph Mali argues that Vico's New Science must be interpreted according to Vico's own clues and rules of interpretation, principally his claim that the 'master-key' of his New Science is the discovery of myth. Following this lead Mali shows how Vico came to forge his new scientific theories about the mythopoeic constitution of consciousness, society, and history by reappraising, or 'rehabilitating' the ancient and primitive mythical traditions which still persist in modern times. He further relates Vico's radical redefinition of these traditions as the 'true narrations' of all religious, social, and political practices in the 'civil world' to his unique historical depiction of Western civilisation as evolving in a-rational and cyclical motions. On this account, Mali elaborates the wider, distinctly 'revisionist', implications of Vico's New Science for the modern human sciences. He argues that inasmuch as the New Science exposed the linguistic and other cultural systems of the modern world as being essentially mythopoeic, it challenges not only the Christian and Enlightenment ideologies of progress in his time, but also the main cultural ideologies of our time.

In an innovative sequence of topics, Ken Dowden explores the uses Greeks made of myth and the uses to which we can put myth in recovering the richness of their culture. Most aspects of Greek life and history - including war, religion and sexuality - which are discernable through myth, as well as most modern approaches, are given a context in a book which is designed to be useful, accessible and stimulating.

A collection of papers on comparative mythology in English by Kazuo Matsumura, a well-known professor of Japanese mythology at Wako University, Tokyo, Japan.

The great expositors of Blake and those who have followed in their footsteps have clarified the most minute particulars of Blake's vision. Now, in the place of traditional exegesis, comes a significantly new set of critical problems and interpretive methods. In this volume of essays, the major shift in Blake studies, already under way in practice, is addressed, gauged, analyzed, and debated. The contributors assembled here, leading exponents of contemporary critical methods as well as close students of Blake, argue the grounds, purposes, and validity of each approach and then apply its method in detailed readings of Blake's works. We see deconstruction, psychoanalytic interpretation, feminist critique, semiotic analysis, Marxist criticism, revisionism, and other methods brought to bear on Blake's texts and into confrontation with one another by those best able to do so. Through the essays themselves and in the reaction they will certainly provoke, Critical Paths will bring increased theoretical awareness to the study of Blake and will further the ongoing redefinition of Blake's art. At the same time, the collection investigates the general problem of methodology in literary studies by means of a casebook examination of modern critical approaches. Blake criticism and current literary theory here come together; the encounter illuminates and enriches both.

This richly illustrated book examines the legacy of Greek mythology in Western art from the classical era to the present. Tracing the emergence, survival, and transformation of key mythological figures and motifs from ancient Greece through the modern era, it explores the enduring importance of such myths for artists and viewers in their own time and over the millennia that followed.

The History and Theory of Fetishism, the expanded version of Iacono's enduring classic Teorie del feticismo and available for the first time in English, aims to provide the historical context necessary to understanding the concept of "fetishism" and offers an overview of the ideologies, prejudices, and critical senses that shaped the Western observer's view of otherness and of his own world. Iacono examines the moment when the Western observer turned his colonizing and evangelizing gaze to continents such as Africa and the Americas, while attempting to simultaneously destabilize and look at his own world critically.

This is the first book-length critical analysis in any language of Hans Blumenberg’s theory of myth. Blumenberg can be regarded as the most important German theorist of myth of the second half of the twentieth century, and his Work on Myth (1979) has resonated across disciplines ranging from literary theory, via philosophy, religious studies and anthropology, to the history and philosophy of science. Nicholls introduces Anglophone readers to Blumenberg’s biography and to his philosophical contexts. He elucidates Blumenberg’s theory of myth by relating it to three important developments in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German philosophy (hermeneutics, phenomenology and philosophical anthropology), while also comparing Blumenberg’s ideas with those of other prominent theorists of myth such as Vico, Hume, Schelling, Max Müller, Frazer, Sorel, Freud, Cassirer, Heidegger, Horkheimer and Adorno. According to Nicholls, Blumenberg’s theory of myth can only be understood in relation to the ‘human sciences,’ since it emerges from a speculative hypothesis concerning the emergence of the earliest human beings. For Blumenberg, myth was originally a cultural adaptation that constituted the human attempt to deal with anxieties concerning the threatening forces of nature by anthropomorphizing those forces into mythic images. In the final two chapters, Blumenberg’s theory of myth is placed within the post-war political context of West Germany. Through a consideration of Blumenberg’s exchanges with Carl Schmitt, as well as by analysing unpublished correspondence and parts of the original Work of Myth manuscript that Blumenberg held back from publication, Nicholls shows that Blumenberg’s theory of myth also amounted to a reckoning with the legacy of National Socialism.