Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship
by:
Bruce Lincoln (author)
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...
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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.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780226482026 (0226482022)
Publish date: April 3rd 2000
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Pages no: 313
Edition language: English
This book is valuable largely because it demonstrates, with ample bibliography, the connection between the political and philological commitments of men like Eliade and Dumézil. The idea that men of this caliber -- and I include Heidegger, Werner Jaeger, and hundreds or thousands of others -- that ...