ABSTRACT
Although myth criticism was undertaken in America from the 1930s through the 1980s, the heyday of the movement lasted from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. During this pioneering period of activity the main figures included Richard Chase, Francis Fergusson, Leslie Fiedler, Daniel Hoffman, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Constance Rourke, and Philip Wheelwright. Among numerous others associated with the rise of myth criticism were Kenneth Burke, Joseph Campbell, and William Troy as well as the British critic Maud Bodkin and the Canadian scholar Northrop Frye-the latter being the leading AngloSaxon literary personage in the movement. Like the major Marxists, New Critics, Chicago Critics, and New York Intellectuals, most of the prominent Myth Critics were born during the first two decades of the century or earlier. (The critics to be discussed in subsequent chapters are from later generations.) Because the Myth Critics as a group did not share key journals or magazines, extensive networks of long-standing friendships, or specific institutional or geographical locations, they constituted less a school than a “movement.” (Burke, Fergusson, Hyman, and Troy, however, were associated with Bennington College.) What united these literary critics was a certain way of thinking about literature and criticism more or less dependent on theories of myth often derived from European anthropology, philosophy, sociology, and/ or folklore studies. The success and popularity during the immediate postwar period in
America of myth criticism can be attributed partially to the narrowness of the reigning formalism and historical scholarship, the impressive growth and attractiveness of early twentieth-century anthropology and psychology, and the dreadful spiritual state of modern man and civilization portrayed so memorably by contemporaneous existential philosophy and literature. More or less self-consciously, Myth Critics reacted against the aridities of formalism and antiquarianism and against the emptiness and absurdities of a godless scientific world; they responded favorably to the newly uncovered anthropological truths concerning the fullness and wonder of man’s universal communal creation of sacred rituals, folktales, and myths. Characteristic of the
Myth Critics were a distrust of technology, a yearning for spiritual significance, an implicit commitment to the idea of community, and an abiding interest in primordial human consciousness. The memorable indictment of modern life provided by Friedrich Nietzsche
in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) can serve as a representative tableau for understanding the deracinated world to which myth criticism was a positive response. According to Nietzsche, society had lost its essential foundations in myth with devastating consequences:
Let us consider abstract man stripped of myth, abstract education, abstract mores, abstract law, abstract government; the random vagaries of the artistic imagination unchanneled by any native myth; a culture without fixed and consecrated place of origin, condemned to exhaust all possibilities and feed miserably and parasitically on every culture under the sun. Here we have our present age.…Man today, stripped of myth, stands famished among all his pasts and must dig frantically for roots.1
