ABSTRACT
In 1966 the French philosopher and critic, Roland Barthes, began his influential essay ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’ with the observation that ‘narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society…narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself (Barthes 1977:79). In the Prologue to his study of the origins and function of myth Joseph Campbell, the American anthropologist, made a similar observation: ‘Man, apparently, cannot maintain himself in the universe without belief in some arrangement of the general inheritance of myth’ (Campbell 1960:4). His investigations into societies both ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, have demonstrated that we do not know of a human culture that has sustained itself without myths, and that the myths have taken the form of narrative. For Campbell narrative is not ‘simply there, like life’, but the means by which a society is shaped and maintained.
