Myth

Offering a concise and illuminating introduction to the most important areas of myth, this fully updated and revised second edition contains new chapters and student-friendly features. Essential reading for students of any level wanting an introduction to the area

Part I. Reading myth : Order : Dying gods ; Words and the word ; The mythical method -- Chaos : The comic vision ; Singer as shaman ; The sacred and the profane ; The heart-of-darkness trip -- Endings : The circuitous quest ; The rhetoric of revelation ; Apocalypse without apocalypse -- Part II. Mythic reading : Truth : Realism and non-realism ; Allegory: the perspective of perfection ; Radical typology: permanent possibility ; Enlightenment and counter-enlightenment --Psyche : The primal crime ; The search for the self ; The grammar of the mind -- History : Criticism as vision ; A single story? ; Testaments of deliverance -- Earth : The war on nature ; Nature now and then ; Nature as revelation ; A religion of the world