The Rise of Modern Mythology 1680-1860: A Critical History with Documents - Hardcover

Feldman, Burton; Richardson, Robert D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0253350123 ISBN 13: 9780253350121

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2000

Synopsis

Since 1972, the post-colonial critique has taught students of mythology what Feldman and Richardson already knew: that Europeans had complex investments in the mythologies that they 'discovered' during this period, and that to understand what we now think we know about mythology we have to examine the lenses that those Europeans provided for us to look through when we read Greek or Hindu sources. These lenses were invisible to us until anthropologists like Claude Levi-Strauss and Clifford Geertz, critics like Michel Foucault and Edward Said, and mythologists like Roland Barthes, Jonathan Z. Smith, and Bruce Lincoln made us aware of them.Now that we have them, we can appreciate all the more, and with a newly suspicious hermeneutic, the sources that Feldman and Richardson collected for us. Mythology has also become a far more important subject than it was 25 years ago, and in a different register still in favour with seekers and Jungians, it is also the object of a sharper interrogation by historians and critics of religion and culture. In this climate, the 'old' texts in this book shed new light on such topical questions as the rise of Fundamentalism and the mass popularity of secular mythologies like "Star Trek", "Star Wars", and "Xena: Warrior Princess"."The Rise of Modern Mythology" is a voice of reason in the contemporary maelstrom of international religious violence and American pluralism more than any book I know, it exposes the roots of the Western appropriation of non-Western mythologies, from 'Lawrence of Arabi' and Krishna Consciousness in airports. 'This is a book that we need now' - Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions, The University of Chicago.

About this title

Review:

" ... peerless ... " --The Key Reporter " ... this book is a first. It will be a standard ... Comprehensiveness as well as the clarity of the headnotes should make it endure." -Choice " ... so good as it stands ... one should simply be happy to have it." --The Journal of the History of Ideas " ... an original, compendious, and highly useful contribution to historical and mythographical scholarship." --The American Scholar "The Rise of Modern Mythology is a voice of reason in the contemporary maelstrom of international religious violence and American pluralism more than any book I know, it exposes the roots of the Western appropriation of non-Western mythologies, from Lawrence of Arabia and Omar Khayyam to Tibetan Buddhism in Hollywood and Krishna Consciousness in airports. This is a book we need now." --Wendy Doniger "There will be no book like it in English for some time to come, with the amplitude or conception of the anthology... Without question the book takes its place as a standard work in the field." --Journal of the History of Ideas "... a useful contribution to the history of myth scholarship in several scholarly traditions... this collection certainly deserves an audience among folklorists, anthropologists, and others in the humanities and social sciences who enjoy the mythology of myth in Western intellectual history."--American Anthropologist

About the Author:

Burton Feldman, Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Denver, has also taught at the University of Chicago and Hebrew University. He has contributed articles on 18th-19th century mythology to the Dictionary of the History of Ideas and The Encyclopedia of Religion, and (with Robert D. Richardson) has edited and introduced Myth and Romanticism, a 50-volume set of sources for English Romantic writers. Robert D. Richardson, Jr. is an independent scholar and literary biographer who currently divides his time between Middletown, Connecticut, Key West, and Cape Cod. He has taught at Harvard, the University of Denver, the University of Colorado, Queens College and the Graduate Center of CUNY, Sichuan University in China, Yale, and Wesleyan. He is author of Literature and Film, Myth and Literature in the American Renaissance, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, and Emerson: The Mind on Fire. He edited (with Allen Mandelbaum) Three Centuries of American Poetry and is working on a biography of William James.

About this edition

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0253350123
• ISBN 13: 9780253350121
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 592