ABSTRACT
Wishful thinking remains within the territory of the human search for a utopian past, present, and future; all the reason why the construction of myth during ancient times survives in the Romantic period and in the modern and postmodern techno-world, and it will continue in the future so long as human wishes are not met in everyday life. Nonetheless, the construction of myth is impossible without the creative power of the imagination, which constituted the aesthetic basis of ancient mythology and of the nineteenth-century Romantic literature. So can the cultivation of postmodern myth in its most digital or textual forms be seen as a diversion from, or a continuation, of the central Romantic concerns in a virtual world as means of escaping the atrocities of that present? In this chapter, I discuss the direct nature of the genealogies of ancient, Romantic, and postmodern myth creation. The strong lineages between present, past, and future are inevitable, and the creation of modern and postmodern literary lexicons such as Neo-Romanticism, meta-romanticism, and even ‘cyberspacism’ uphold essential features of nineteenth-century Romantic aesthetics.
