The Survival of Myth: Innovation, Singularity and Alterity
Paul Hardwick · David Kennedy
Apr 2010 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Ebook
240
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About this ebook
What are myths and what are they for? Myths are stories that both tell us how to live and remind us of the inescapability and pull of the collective past. The Survival of Myth: Innovation, Singularity and Alterity explores the continuing power of primal stories to inhabit our thinking. An international range of contributors examine a range of texts and figures from the Bible to Cormac McCarthy and from Thor to the Virgin Mary to focus on the way that ancient stories both give access to the unconscious and offer individuals and communities personae or masks. Myths translated and recreated become, in this sense, very public acts about very private thoughts and feelings. The subtitle of the book, ‘Innovation, Singularity and Alterity,’ reflects the way in which the history of cultures in all genres is a history of innovation, of a search for new modes of expression which, paradoxically, often entails recourse to myth precisely because it offers narratives of singularity and otherness which may be readily appropriated. The individual contributors offer testament to the continuing significance of myth through its own constant metamorphosis, as it both reflects and transforms the societies in which it is (re)produced.
About the author
Dr Paul Hardwick is Reader in English at Leeds Trinity and All Saints, UK. He is co-editor, with Sandra Hordis, of Medieval English Comedy (Brepols, 2007) and publishes widely on medieval art and literature, and nineteenth and twentieth century medievalisms. A monograph, English Misericords and the Margins of Meaning, is forthcoming from Boydell and Brewer.
Dr David Kennedy is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Hull, UK. He is the author of Douglas Dunn (2008) and Elegy (Routledge New Critical Idiom, 2007). A study of ekphrasis in contemporary British poetry is forthcoming from Ashgate.
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