Document Type

Book Review

Publication Date

Spring 2006

Abstract

The Modern Construction of Myth, by Andrew yon Hendy, is an interdisciplinary survey of the construction of myth in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The author's thesis is that modern theories of myth can be divided into three broad groups, folkloristic, ideological, and constitutive, and that they all derive from an original, romantic, construct. The survey is organized diachronically, with some attention to taxonomy and axiology. I find the author's thesis entirely persuasive: what follows is meant to serve as a guide to the overall argument and additionally to highlight various important threads that remain somewhat diffuse in a book of this scope.

Editor

Bruce Holsinger

Publisher

University of Colorado at Boulder

City

Boulder, CO

Publication Information

English Language Notes: Literary History and the Religious Turn

Included in

Classics Commons

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