myth criticism

myth criticism, an area of literary investigation and commentary that deals with the relations between ‘myth’—in the positive sense of a traditional story—and literature, often drawing upon anthropology, psychology, and studies of folklore. Myth criticism is usually concerned to demonstrate that literary works draw upon a common reservoir of archetypes or recurrent images, or that their narrative patterns repeat those of ancient myths or religious rituals, as in quests for sacred objects, or cycles of death and rebirth. Much psychoanalytic criticism overlaps with myth criticism, not just in the tradition of Jung but in that of Freud, who interpreted literary texts as well as dreams and neurotic symptoms as echoes of the Oedipus myth.

An early study in this vein is Maud Bodkin's Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934); other notable works include Robert Graves's The White Goddess (1948), and Auden's The Enchafèd Flood (1951). A more elaborate theoretical foundation for myth criticism was proposed by Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957). This tradition of literary study came under repeated attack for dealing only with the ‘contents’ of literary works and ignoring all questions of language and style; and it declined in the 1960s as new theoretical agendas redefined the relations between anthropological and literary study (see structuralism and post-structuralism).