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    • Publisher:
      Cambridge University Press
      Publication date:
      18 December 2009
      28 January 1997
      ISBN:
      9780511581731
      9780521580168
      9780521035347
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.544kg, 272 Pages
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.418kg, 272 Pages
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    Book description

    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.

    Reviews

    ‘This study makes an original contribution to ongoing debates in literary criticism.’

    Source: Manuscript

    '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.'

    Source: Anglia Newspaper for English Philology

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