In Theorizing Myth, Bruce Lincoln traces the way scholars and others have used the category of "myth" to fetishize or deride certain kinds of stories, usually those told by others. He begins by showing that mythos yielded to logos not as part of a (mythic) "Greek miracle," but as part of struggles over political, linguistic, and epistemological authority occasioned by expanded use of writing and the practice of Athenian democracy. Lincoln then turns his attention to the period when myth was recuperated as a privileged type of narrative, a process he locates in the political and cultural ferment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here, he connects renewed enthusiasm for myth to the nexus of Romanticism, nationalism, and Aryan triumphalism, particularly the quest for a language and set of stories on which nation-states could be founded. In the final section of this wide-ranging book, Lincoln advocates a fresh approach to the study of myth, providing varied case studies to support his view of myth—and scholarship on myth—as ideology in narrative form.
See Joseph L. Henderson , Thresholds of Initiation ( Middletown , Conn .: Wesleyan University Press , 1967 ) , esp . ... Kenneth L. Golden ( New York : Garland Publishing , 1992 ) . 55. See J. G. Frazer , The Golden Bough , 3d ed .
Alan Dundes defines myth as a sacred narrative that explains how the world and humanity came to be in their present form. This new volume brings together classic statements on the theory of myth by the authors.
Taking their cue from the work of Robert A. Segal, they discuss how to theorize about religion and myth from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.
Explores the construction of the Aryan myth and its uses in both India and Europe.
"To the student of myth: This book attempts to provide a concise overview of the theoretical approaches to studying mythology, both in theory and in everyday life.
Strouse Edition of the Writings of Thomas Carlyle. Berkeley: University of California Press. Grierson, H. J. C. 1933. Carlyle and Hitler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1953 [1837]. The Philosophy of History ...
Myth, Cosmos, and Society: Indo-European Themes of Creation and Destruction
This collection explores the theoretical and methodological foundations through which we understand Old Norse myths and the mythological world, and the medieval sources in which we find expressions of these.
Altogether, this collection scrutinizes the explicit and implicit assumptions theorists make about religion as an object of analysis.
... Morrill SUPERCONDUCTIVITY Stephen Blundell SYMMETRY Ian Stewart TAXATION Stephen Smith TEETH Peter S. Ungar TERRORISM Charles Townshend THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY Charles O. Jones THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION Robert J. Allison THE AMERICAN ...