Literature, Modernism and Myth
Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century

A study of the use of myth by modernists, and its relationship to contemporary notions of postmodernity.

Michael Bell (Author)

9780521580168, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 January 1997

272 pages
23.6 x 15.9 x 2 cm, 0.544 kg

'Bell manages to successfully place these traditions within a lively dialogue of modern Britain and America, whilst also laying to rest the fashionable criticisms about myths.' Anglia Newspaper for English Philology

The use of myth in Modernist literature is a misleadingly familiar theme. Joyce's appropriation of Homer's Odyssey and Eliot's of Frazer's Golden Bough are, like Lawrence's primitivism or Yeats's nationalist folklore, attempts to discover an underlying metaphysic in an increasingly fragmented world. In Literature, Modernism and Myth Michael Bell also examines the relationship of myth and modernism to postmodernism. Myth, Bell shows, is inherently flexible; it was used to justify Pound's totalizing vision of society which eventually descended into fascism, and the liberal, ironic vision of human existence Joyce and Mann expressed. Those theorists who present myth as another form of mystification, a search for false origins, ignore its use by modernists to emphasise the ultimate contingency of all values. This anti-foundational element, Bell claims, enables myth to act as a corrective to the claims of ideological critique. Bell shows how postmodern concerns with political and social responsibility, and the role literature plays in formulating this, have in fact been inherited from modernism.

Introduction
Part I: 1. Myth in the age of the world view
Part II: 2. Varieties of modernist mythopoeia
3. Countercases: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound
4. The politics of modernist mythopoeia
Part III: 5. The break-up of modernist mythopoeia
6. Living with myth: Cervantes and the new world
7. Living without myth: deconstructing the old world
Part IV: Conclusion: ideology, myth and criticism
Notes
Select bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]