Abstract
In a 1923 review of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the young poet and critic T.S. Eliot announced the emergence of a method of criticism and writing that would change both literature and the world:
In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him …. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history …. Psychology … ethnology and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art.1
By the time this review appeared, Eliot had already begun his own experiments with the “mythical method” in composing The Waste Land, a poem built around sustained reference to various myths. The assumption underlying Eliot’s mythical method was that contemporary civilization faced problems that could be redressed by deploying myth.
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Notes
T.S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order and Myth,” The Dial 75 (November 1923), 483.
J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), 144–45, 147.
Hans G. Kippenberg, Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age, trans. Barbara Harshaw (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002 ), 41–42.
See Robert Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School: J.G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists ( New York: Routledge, 2002 ), 31–32.
See Henrika Kuklick, “Tribal Exemplars: Images of Political Authority in British Authority in British Anthropology, 1885–1945,” in George W. Stocking, Jr., ed., Functionalism Historicized ( Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984 ), 63.
Edward B. Tylor, Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization, rev. ed. (London: Macmillan, 1924 ), 387.
William Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites ( 1889; reprint, London: Transaction Publishers, 2002 ), 17–18.
Roger Lancelyn Greene, Andrew Lang: A Critical Biography ( Leicester: Edmund Ward, 1946 ), 86.
Stanley Edgar Hyman, The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as Imaginative Writers ( New York: Atheneum, 1962 ).
The best recent biographical studies of Frazer are Robert Ackerman, J.G. Frazer: His Life and Work ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 )
Robert Fraser, The Making of The Golden Bough: The Origins and Growth of an Argument ( London: Palgrave, 2001 ).
The emergence of social anthropology in Britain has been examined by numerous scholars, an unusual number of whom are themselves anthropologists. Key studies include George W. Stocking, Jr., After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995 ); idem, ed., Functionalism Historicized: Essays on British Social Anthropology ( Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984 )
Jack Goody, The Expansive Moment: The Rise of Social Anthropology in Britain and Africa 1918–1970 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 )
Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 )
Adam Kuper, Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School, rev. ed. ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983 )
Michael W. Young, Malinowski: Odyssey of an Anthropologist, 1884–1920 ( New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004 )
Roy Ellen, ed., Malinowski Between Two Worlds: the Polish Roots of an Anthropological Tradition ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 ).
John B. Vickery, The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973 ), 28.
J.G. Frazer, “The Scope of Social Anthropology,” in Psyche’s Task: A Discourse Concerning the Influence of Superstition on the Growth of Institutions, 2nd ed., (London: Macmillan & Co., 1913), 170. See also Ackerman, J.G. Frazer, 212–23 for Frazer’s concerns about the fragility of civilization.
On the Victorians’ relationship to the classical past see Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain ( New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981 ).
Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 3rd ed. ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922 ), 657.
Jane Ellen Harrison, Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens (London, 1890), iii. Italics in original.
Jane Ellen Harrison, “Unanimism and Conversion,” in Alpha and Omega ( London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1915 ), 51.
Robert Ackerman, Introduction to Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), xxii.
Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis; A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, with an Excursus on the Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy by Professor Gilbert Murray and a Chapter on the Origin of the Olympic Games by Mr F.M. Cornford ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912 ), 122.
Jane Ellen Harrison, Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921 ), 38.
See Jessie Weston, From Ritual to Romance (London: Cambridge University Press, 1920), vii–viii; 35, n. 2.
Richard Barber, The Grail: Imagination and Belief ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004 ), 249.
See Marc Girouard, Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1981 ).
Wallace W. Douglas, article “The Meanings of ‘Myth’ in Modern Criticism,” Modern Philology 50, no. 4 (May 1953), 241.
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© 2013 Matthew Sterenberg
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Sterenberg, M. (2013). Golden Boughs, Fairy Books, and Holy Grails: The Making of a Myth-Saturated Culture. In: Mythic Thinking in Twentieth-Century Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137354976_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137354976_2
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