Literature, Modernism and Myth
Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23497525 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Marcus Bell (0000-0002-8919-6403, University of Warwick, corresponding author), Michael Bell (0000-0002-3401-7746) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Publication date | 2009-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | BOOK |
| Venue | Literature, Modernism and Myth (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1017/cbo9780511581731 |
| OpenAlex | W4256445670 |
| ISBN | 9780511581731 |
| Open Library | OL34437338M |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
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.
Aesthetics · anti-foundationalism · Appropriation · Art · D. H. Lawrence · Epistemology · Ezra Pound · Ideology · ideology critique · James Joyce · Literature · Modernism (music) · modernist literature · mystification · Myth · Mythology · Nationalism · Odyssey · Political science · Politics · Postmodernism · T. S. Eliot · Thomas Mann · W. B. Yeats · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Giambattista Vico and Joyce · History · Law · Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Themes in Literature Analysis
| Citations per year | 0.55 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2015 - 2022 (8) |
| Highly cited | No |