Twentieth Century Mythologies eBook

Because its topic is not so much the study of myth as much as it is theories of myth, this book aims at a rather precise goal: to make a contribution to writing a history of ideas in the twentieth century. Twentieth Century Mythologies does this by offering a comparative epistemology to examine the diverse scholarly definitions of, and hypotheses concerning, myth and myths-assembling both theorists and theories into a coherent picture in which the specific place, contributions, as well as shortcomings, of each becomes apparent. The book examines in detail the influential work of three great scholars: the noted Indo-Europeanist Georges Dumezil, the structuralist anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, and the historian of religions Mircea Eliade. Taken together, the scholarly productions of these authors comprise the twentieth-century's body of work, or discourse, on myth(s). First published in France in 1993, and since then translated into Italian (1995) and Romanian (2003), Twentieth Century Mythologies provides an indispensable resource not only for scholars of religion and myth, but also for those interested in both the history and the impact of ideas in the last century.