Twentieth Century Mythologies
Résumé
Because its topic is not so much the study of myth as much as it is theories of myth, this book has a rather precise goal : to make a contribution to writing a history of ideas in the twentieth century. "20th 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 theroies into a coherent picture in which the specific place and 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 Geoges Dumézil, the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the historian of religions Mircea Eliade. Taken together, the scholarly productions of these authors constitute the twentieth century's body of work, or discourse, on myth(s).