This Very Short Introduction explores different approaches to myth from several disciplines, including science, religion, philosophy, literature, and psychology. In this new edition, Robert Segal considers both the future study of myth as well as the impact of areas such as cognitive science and the latest approaches to narrative theory.

This book explores the appropriation and transformation of classical mythology by French culture from the mid-twelfth century to about 1430. Each of the five chapters focuses on a specific moment in this process and asks: What were the purposes of transforming classical myth? Which techniques did poets use to integrate classical subject matter into their own texts? Was a special interpretive tradition created for vernacular texts? In Chapter 1, the author shows how Latin epic texts were reoriented for political purposes in the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman realm, gaining new depth by the addition of Ovidian elements that evoked threats of a disorder different from the struggles of classical epic. Chapter 2 analyzes the complex use of myth in the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose, which offers new conjunctions and interpretations of myths related to language, artistic expression, and sexuality. Chapter 3 focuses on the interpretive techniques and vocabulary of the fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé, such as "allegory," "fable," and istoire, arguing that the Christianization of the Metamorphoses created a "new Ovid" in the form of a fourteenth-century friar. Chapter 4 reveals that, although Guillaume de Machaut questioned the usefulness of mythic fables, he turned to them to invoke artistic consolation and ward off threats to his poetic voice. It also describes how Jean Froissart produced new myths by combining existing fables with newly invented elements in an attempt to dramatize the poetic creativity of his age. Finally, Chapter 5 demonstrates how Christine de Pizan offered the full range of medieval possibilities for myth: playing with the mythographic tradition, inscribing herself into Ovidian myths, offering historical explanations, rewriting myths from a pro-woman stance, and finally creating mythic universes of her own.

This collection of thirty-four major essays devoted to the theories, methods, and problems of myth criticism offers a convenient and substantial introduction to one of the most distinctive trends in contemporary literary study. The essays (many of them previously uncollected) are arranged to lead from general considerations to analyses of specific authors. The four Part I selections constitute an informal survey of the views of myth and ritual taken by disciplines other than literature. In Part II the first six essays relate the concept of myth and ritual to general literary theory, while the final three evaluate the uses of myth in critical theory and practice. The twenty-one Part III essays, which apply myth criticism to individual literary works or authors, afford a representative sampling of the mythopoeic patterns discerned in literature from Home to Faulkner. Among the contributors are: David Bidney, Gäza R¢heim, Joseph Campbell, Clyde Kluckhohn, Stanley Hyman, Philip Wheelwright, Richard Chase, Harold Watts, Northrop Frye, Andrew Lytle, Philip Rahv, Francis Fergusson, Marvin Magalaner, John Lydenberg, and Harry Slochower.

First published in 1975, Myth and Literature considers three points at which the concept of myth has entered modern literary imagination: the use of myth – or atleast their understanding of myth -- as a creative opening by modern writers, its exploration by critics as an interpretive device, and the analogy between certain ‘sense-making’ functions of ‘myth’, ‘fiction’ and literature itself. All three of these roles show the gradual movement from a point of precise demand to a diffuse and variable concept which is more pervasive because less distinct. The paradox of myth is shown to lie in its simultaneity of its corruption with the growth of its power over the modern literary mind. This book will be of interest to students of literature and history.

There was no simple agreement on the subject of "myth" in classical antiquity, and there remains none today. In Approaches to Greek Myth, Lowell Edmunds brings together practitioners of eight of the most important contemporary approaches to the subject. Whether exploring myth from a historical, comparative, or theoretical perspective, each lucidly describes a particular approach, applies it to one or more myths, and reflects on what the approach yields that others do not. Contributors are H. S. Versnel on the intersections of myth and ritual; Carlo Brillante, on the history of Greek myth and history in Greek myth; Robert Mondi, on the near Eastern contexts, and Joseph Falaky Nagy, on the Indo-European structure in Greek myth; William F. Hansen on myth and folklore; Claude Calame, on the Greimasian approach; Richard Caldwell, on psychoanalytic interpretations; and Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, on the iconography of vase paintings of Theseus and Medea—and on a methodology for "reading" such visual sources. In his introduction, Edmunds confronts Marcel Detienne's recent deconstruction of the notion of Greek mythology and reconstructs a meaning for myth among the ancient Greeks.

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Essays by Thomas Mann, Philips Rieff, Mircea Eliade, and a dozen other contributors on myths in life and literature, many originally published in "Daedalus" by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

How does a city's legendary past affect its present? Thebes remains a city with one of the richest traditions of myth in all of Greece - it was the home of Cadmus, Oedipus, and Hercules, and the traditional birthplace of Dionysus. The city's topography, both natural and built, very often plays a significant role in its myths. By focusing on Greek literature ranging from the oral epics to the travel writing of the Roman Empire, this book explores the relationship between the city's spaces as they were represented in the Greek literary tradition and the physical realities of a developing city that had been continuously inhabited since at least the second millennium BC. Spurred on especially by the city's catastrophic sack by Alexander the Great in 335 BC, the urban topography of Thebes came more and more to reflect the literary, even fictional, constructions of its mythic past.

There is an emphasis on de-constructing, de-centring, de-stabilizing, and especially de-mythologizing in the study that illustrates New World myth narrators questioning the past in the present and carrying out their original investigations of myth, place, and identity. Underlining the fact that political realities are encoded in the language and narrative of the works, Vautier argues that the reworkings of literary, religious, and historical myths and political ideologies in these novels are grounded in their shared situation of being in and of the New World.