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1) Classical(Latin) Literature in the Medieval Period(p.9). To preserve Latin literature inevitably meant preserving classical mythology. This posed a serious problem for the Church and Christian readers: the myths were an integral part of the literature they loved and revered, but also part of a false, pagan belief system. The most popular medieval solution to this dilemma was to treat the myths allegorically. the voyages of Odysseus or Aeneas as the human journey through life, Cronus eating his children could be rationalised as a symbol of devouring Time. 2) The Renaissance as a period of rediscovery of the classics(p.9). The lead was taken by the humanist scholars who were interested in human rather than theological studies believing in the ideal of 'humane' learning which creates a well-rounded human being. They searched out manuscripts of Latin texts as well as Greek texts long unknown in the west. Out of this rediscovery came a new set of attitudes to the classical world such as a new kind of respect for classical literature as a model for imitation and a new ideal of education whose curriculum was centred on Latin and Greek. 3) Myth as allegory/romance in the Renaissance Period(pp.10-11). Major writers like Edmund Spenser(The Fairie Queene) and John Milton(Paradise Lost) draw upon the tradition of allegorical interpretation, interweaving classical myths with Christian doctrine. ‘Erotic Epyllions[mini-epic]’ such as Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis” and Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander” create an idealised mythic world, without allegory or Christianising. 4) Myth in the 17th and 18th century: the paradoxical result is that the period from 1660 to the 1780s is the heyday of English classicism-especially the earlier eighteenth century often called ‘Augustan’ for its conscious emulation of the Augustan age of ancient Rome; yet this period also saw the lowest decline of myth in English literature(p.12). Another paradox is that the same spirit of scientific inquiry which had almost killed myth in the seventeenth century also contributed to its revival at the end of the eighteenth century when the scientific study of religion and mythology was inaugurated with the scholars who studied the classical myths simply as cultural phenomena rather than as sources of ancient wisdom or of pagan corruption(p.12). 5) Myth in the Romantic Period. With their exaltation of imagination over mere reason, their worship of nature, their love of fantasy and romance, they were prepared to see the myth not as a childish and outmoded habit of thought but as a perennially valid vehicle of insight: for them, to see the landscape as inhabited by the presences of gods, nymphs, and satyrs was not a primitive superstition or a conventional image but a vivid metaphor for the divine power which pervades the natural world(p.12). For the first generation of Romantics, however, classical myth was still tainted with the fustiness of eighteenth-century convention; the Wordsworth and Coleridge of Lyrical Ballads turned more readily to medieval ballads and folk-tales. It was the second generation who found a new inspiration in Greek myth. Keats embodied his concerns with love and beauty and human suffering in Endymion the unfinished Hyperion poems; Shelley more radically transformed myths in Adonais and Prometheus Unbound(p.12). Shelley’s comments in the preface to his play Hellas(1822)(p.14): “We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their roots in Greece ... The human form and the human mind attained to a perfection in Greece which has impressed its image on those faultless productions, whose very fragments are the despair of modern art, and has propagated impulses which cannot cease . . . to ennoble and delight mankind until the extinction of the race.”(pp.12-13) Shelley’s panegyric reflects a new sense that the art and literature and mythology of Greece, even in ‘fragments’, were the real thing, and superior to their Roman imitations. Homer and Plato, rather than Virgil and Horace and Ovid, are the great classical figures of the nineteenth century(p.13). 6) Myth in the nineteenth century. The Victorian period (1837-1901) produced a huge volume of poetry on mythological themes such as Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ (1842) and other dramatic monologues, Arnold’s 'The Strayed Reveller’ (1849). Nevertheless, as the century goes on, mythology comes to seem increasingly marginal. On the one side the ‘creed outworn’ was once again being challenged by Christianity. On the other hand, the modern world of ‘getting and spending’, industrialism, commerce, science, political reform, and empire, made the old myths seem increasingly remote and irrelevant, while the creative energies of the period thrived in the novel and discursive prose rather than in mythological poetry. In the latter half of the century the irrelevance of myth becomes its positive attraction. Pre-Raphaelites like D. G. Rossetti and William Morris (who hark back beyond the Renaissance to the Middle Ages and the ancient world), and aesthetes like Swinburne and Wilde use it to create an idealised dream-world, a vanished time which can be contemplated with wistful nostalgia. Where the Middle Ages simply assimilated classical myth to their own world, and the Renaissance and the Romantics used it to deal with contemporary concerns, the late Victorians, aware of looking back at it over a vast abyss of time and change, see it as a refuge from drab contemporary reality(pp. 13-14). 7) Myth and Modernism of the early twentieth century. Sir James Frazer in his massive study The Golden Bough applied the techniques of modern anthropology to ancient myth and religion, finding startling similarities between classical myths and the beliefs of present-day ‘primitive’ peoples. Behind the statuesque dignity of Greek myths, they suggested, there often lay barbaric and bloody rites, such as the sacrifice of a sacred god-king to ensure the fertility of the soil(p.14). Psychoanalysis and Myth: Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung argued the vital psychological importance of myths. For Freud, they embody primal human drives of sexuality and violence, which may emerge in dreams or fantasies when the rational mind represses them: for instance, the story of Oedipus, who (unwittingly) killed his father and married his mother, reflects the instinctive desire of every young male child to do precisely that (the ‘Oedipus complex’). For Jung, they are ‘archetypes’, powerful images from the ‘collective unconscious’ of the entire human race, embodying our deepest desires and needs; understanding them can help us to achieve psychic integration and health. Once again, as in the Renaissance, myths are seen as symbolic representations of profound truth. Their irrationality is no longer a barrier to taking them seriously - in fact, in an irrational and chaotic modern world, it guarantees their significance and value(p.14). T. S. Eliot on Myth: Eliot, in a 1923 review of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), wrote: “Psychology ... , ethnology and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible only a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art.”(p.14) The ‘modernist’ writers of the earlier twentieth century embraced myth as a way of imposing significance (if sometimes by ironic contrast) on a chaotic or shabby modern world. Joyce’s Ulysses overlays a day in Dublin in 1904 on top of the epic plot of Homer’s Oyssey, at once mocking the littleness of modern life and suggesting the persistence of archetypal, age-old concerns from archaic Greece to modern Ireland. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) draws on Frazer’s discussion of ancient fertility myths, creating a waste land which images both the chaos of post-war Europe and the arid psyche of contemporary western man(p. 15). 8) Myth in the later twentieth century. The later twentieth century might seem a period inimical to myth, with the enormous explosion of science and technology, the proliferation of non-classical literary forms and media(journalism, cinema, television), the decline of the ‘classical education' and of knowledge of the classical languages, the rising protests against literary elitism and the dominance of Dead White European Males(p. 15). A new approaches to Myth: Multiculturalism and Feminism(p. 15-16). 9) Myth in the twenty-first century. If knowledge of Greek and Latin has declined, translations of classical works and popular accounts of the myths proliferate. Ovid, in particular, seems to be undergoing a boom in the 1990s... In the age of postmodernism and magical realism, Ovid, with his mixture of wit and fantasy and violence, his artful fragmentariness and his hints of serious meaning under a kaleidoscopically frivolous surface, once again seems a very modern writer...At any rate, it seems a safe bet that, so long as our civilisation lasts through the new millennium, the classical myths will survive as well(p.16).
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