First published in 1950, this is a late work by Charles Baudouin, world-famous French psychologist, and takes its title from the opening chapter which examines the transformation of the myth of Progress, characteristic of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, into the myth of Modernity, characteristic of the time of writing. The author has little sympathy for a development which he regards as essentially vulgar; the myth of Progress, he says, had its aspiration and gave man reasons for reaching out for better things, but the myth of Modernity ‘seems to give humanity reasons only for fleeing from itself, reasons for unhappiness, inasmuch as the man who runs away from himself is an unhappy man’. This chapter is characteristic of those that follow – on Baudelaire, Verlaine and other literary topics; on Art and the Epoch, The Prestige of Action, Technique versus Mysticism, Opinion and Tolerance, etc. A broad humanity and a gentle irony are the characteristic features of this stimulating book, now available again to be enjoyed in its historical context.

A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world. By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.

This publication offers a critical survey of religious change and its causes in 18th-century Europe. Focusing on the Enlightenment in Italy, France and England, the text illustrates how the canonical view of 18th-century religious change has in reality been constructed upon scant evidence and assumption.

DIVCombines Marxist and postmodern approaches to argue that patriarchy has provided the central organizing principle of Nicaraguan agrarian labor systems./div

With The Modern Myths, brilliant science communicator Philip Ball spins a new yarn. From novels and comic books to B-movies, it is an epic exploration of literature, new media and technology, the nature of storytelling, and the making and meaning of our most important tales. Myths are usually seen as stories from the depths of time—fun and fantastical, but no longer believed by anyone. Yet, as Philip Ball shows, we are still writing them—and still living them—today. From Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein to Batman, many stories written in the past few centuries are commonly, perhaps glibly, called “modern myths.” But Ball argues that we should take that idea seriously. Our stories of Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Sherlock Holmes are doing the kind of cultural work that the ancient myths once did. Through the medium of narratives that all of us know in their basic outline and which have no clear moral or resolution, these modern myths explore some of our deepest fears, dreams, and anxieties. We keep returning to these tales, reinventing them endlessly for new uses. But what are they really about, and why do we need them? What myths are still taking shape today? And what makes a story become a modern myth? In The Modern Myths, Ball takes us on a wide-ranging tour of our collective imagination, asking what some of its most popular stories reveal about the nature of being human in the modern age.

A scholar explores the ideas within The Lord of the Rings and the world created by J. R. R. Tolkien: “A most valuable and timely book” (Ursula K. Le Guin, Los Angeles Times–bestselling author of Changing Planes). What are millions of readers all over the world getting out of reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy? Defending Middle-earth argues, in part, that the appeal for fans goes far deeper than just quests and magic rings and hobbits. In fact, through this epic, Tolkien found a way to provide something close to spirit in a secular age. This thoughtful book focuses on three main aspects of Tolkien’s fiction: the social and political structure of Middle-earth and how the varying cultures within it find common cause in the face of a shared threat; the nature and ecology of Middle-earth and how what we think of as the natural world joins the battle against mindless, mechanized destruction; and the spirituality and ethics of Middle-earth—for which the author provides a particularly insightful and resonant examination. Includes a new afterword

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.

"James Joyce and the Mythology of Modernism" examines anew how myth exists in Joyce's fiction. Using Joyce's idiosyncratic appropriation of the myths of Catholicism, this study explores how the rejected religion still acts as a foundational aesthetic for a new mythology of the Modern age starting with "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and maturing within "Ulysses". Like the mythopoets before him -- Homer, Dante, Milton, Blake -- Joyce consciously sets out to encapsulate his vision of a splintered and rapidly changing reality into a new aesthetic which alone is capable of successfully rendering the fullness of life in a meaningful way. Already reeling from the humanistic implications of an impersonal Newtonian universe, the Modern world now faced an Einsteinian one, a re-evaluation which includes Stephen's awakening from the "nightmare" of history, a re-definition of deity, and Bloom's urban identity. Written with both the experienced Joycean and the beginner in mind, this book tells how the Joycean myth is our own conception of the human being, and our place in the universe becomes (re)defined as definitively Modernist, yet still, through Molly Bloom's final affirmation, profoundly human.

This study explores the prevalence in German culture of myths about ancient matriarchal societies, discussing their presence in left and right wing politics, feminist and antifeminist writing, sociology, psychoanalysis and literary production. By tracing the influence of the works of the Swiss jurist and theorist of matriarchy, Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–1887), and the controversies about the reception and interpretation of his work, this study shows how debate about the matriarchal origins of culture was inextricably linked with anxieties about modernity and gender identities at the turn of the twentieth century. By moving beyond the discussion of canonical authors and taking seriously the scope of the discussion, it becomes clear that it is not possible to reduce matriarchal theories to any particular political ideology; instead, they function as a mythic counterdiscourse to a modernity conceived as oppressive, rational and masculine. Writers considered include Ludwig Klages, Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Hauptmann, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Sir Galahad, Clara Viebig, Mathilde Vaerting, Thomas Mann, Elisabeth Langgässer, Ilse Langner, Otto Gross, Franz Werfel, and many others.