Literature, modernism and myth : belief and responsibility in the twentieth century / Michael Bell.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 247-256) and index.

Print version record.

1. Myth in the age of the world view -- 2. Varieties of modernist mythopoeia. W.B. Yeats: 'in dreams begin responsibilities'. James Joyce's Ulysses: Trieste -- Zurich -- Paris 1914-1922. D.H. Lawrence: 'Am I out of my mind?' -- 3. Countercases: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. T.S. Eliot: Religion versus myth. Odysseus unbound: the Cantos of Ezra Pound -- 4. The Politics of modernist mythopoeia. Joseph Conrad and the 'Africa' within -- 5. The break-up of modernist mythopoeia. Novel, story and the foreign: Thomas Mann, Cervantes, and Primo Levi -- 6. Living with myth: Cervantes and the new world. Alejo Carpentier: recovering the marvellous in The Kingdom of this World. Myth and fiction in Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude -- 7. Living without myth: deconstructing the old world. Believing in the allegators: Thomas Pynchon and urban legend. Ideology and confidence: flights of fancy in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus. Conclusion: ideology, myth and criticism.

The use of myth in Modernist literature is a misleadingly familiar theme. Joyce's appropriation of Homer's Odyssey and Eliot's of Frazer's Golden Bough are, like Lawrence's primitivism or Yeats's nationalist folklore, attempts to discover an underlying metaphysic in an increasingly fragmented world. In Literature, Modernism and Myth Michael Bell also examines the relationship of myth and modernism to postmodernism. Myth, Bell shows, is inherently flexible; it was used to justify Pound's totalizing vision of society which eventually descended into fascism, and the liberal, ironic vision of human existence Joyce and Mann expressed. Those theorists who present myth as another form of mystification, a search for false origins, ignore its use by modernists to emphasise the ultimate contingency of all values. This anti-foundational element, Bell claims, enables myth to act as a corrective to the claims of ideological critique. Bell shows how postmodern concerns with political and social responsibility, and the role literature plays in formulating this, have in fact been inherited from modernism.

English.

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