Skip to main content
Article
The Modern Construction of Myth [Review]
English Language Notes: Literary History and the Religious Turn
  • Erwin F Cook, Trinity University
Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
4-1-2006
Disciplines
Abstract

The Modern Construction of Myth, by Andrew yon Hendy, is an interdisciplinary survey of the construction of myth in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The author's thesis is that modern theories of myth can be divided into three broad groups, folkloristic, ideological, and constitutive, and that they all derive from an original, romantic, construct. The survey is organized diachronically, with some attention to taxonomy and axiology. I find the author's thesis entirely persuasive: what follows is meant to serve as a guide to the overall argument and additionally to highlight various important threads that remain somewhat diffuse in a book of this scope.

Editor
Bruce Holsinger
Publisher
University of Colorado at Boulder
Citation Information
Cook, E.F. (2006). [Review of the book The Modern Construction of Myth, by A. von Hendy]. English Language Notes: Literary History and the Religious Turn, 44(1), 283-301.