MYTH (1997 & 2009)
Laurence Coupe offers students a comprehensive overview of the development of myth, showing how mythic themes, structures and symbols persist in literature and entertainment today. This introductory volume:
- illustrates the relation between myth, culture and literature with discussions of poetry, fiction, film and popular song
- explores uses made of the term ‘myth’ within the fields of literary criticism, anthropology, cultural studies, feminism, Marxism and psychoanalysis
- discusses the association between modernism, postmodernism, myth and history
- familiarizes the reader with themes such as the dying god, the quest for the Grail, the relation between ‘chaos’ and ‘cosmos’, and the vision of the end of time
- demonstrates the growing importance of the green dimension of myth.
Fully updated and revised in this new edition, Myth is both a concise introduction and a useful tool to students first approaching the topic, while also a valuable contribution to the study of myth. Beginning with a reading of the Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now, and branching out from there to include discussions of most of the key writers of the Anglo-American tradition, this book proceeds to demonstrate the mythic basis of literature and culture; in doing so it puts forward a new way of thinking about how myths function and evolve, which the author calls ‘radical typology’. The second, fully revised edition (2009) includes an extra chapter, ‘Earth’, which significantly expands the original argument by discussing the relation between mythology and ecology.
Responses to MYTH (1997)
The celebrated Jungian scholar Susan A. Rowland explicitly applies my theory of ‘radical typology’, outlined in Myth, to Carl Jung’s work in her Jung as a Writer (London: Routledge, 2005).
Bob Trubshaw has drawn extensively on my view of the relevance of apocalypse in his Explore Mythology (Loughborough: Heart of Albion Press, 2003).
Marina Warner praises Myth as ‘a lively and clear introduction to different approaches [to the subject]’ in ‘Introduction’, World of Myths (London: British Museum Press, 2003).
Robert A. Segal writes in his Myth: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 2004): ‘For a refreshingly sensible postmodern approach to myth, see Laurence Coupe, Myth (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).’
In his Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen (New York: Perseus Books, 2003), the poet and critic Roger Green writes about his discovery of Myth in an Athens bookshop:
It’s a wonderful antidote to the shelves of works on “Greek Myth”. I need Coupe to inform me about what stage contemporary criticism (or certain branches thereof) has reached. … Certain other academics also need Coupe and people like him. A few years ago, I attended a symposium at a British university called “Myth in Modern Greek Literature”. We might have been snugly and smugly back in the nineteenth century. I don’t recall hearing mentioned any of the names in Coupe’s long and admirable bibliography. None gave the slightest indication of awareness of exciting developments taking place in other disciplines such as anthropology, theology, comparative literature, linguistics, semiology, philosophy, psychology – to name but a few – exciting developments of the greatest relevance to the topic under discussion.
Responses to MYTH, 2nd fully revised edition (2009)
In her review for the International Journal of Jungian Studies, Susan Rowland writes:
I have been recommending this excellent book, Myth, by Laurence Coupe to colleagues, students, scholars and friends ever since the arrival of the first edition in the late 1990s. Now in a revised, even better edition, with the inestimable benefit of a far stronger section on Jung, Myth deserves even wider appreciation. …
Also, as this new edition offers us, we see the extraordinary and vital growth of myth in response to environmental apocalypse. Coupe illustrates this in the example of James Lovelock’s environmental science known as ‘Gaia’. Lovelock readily adopted the ancient Greek myth of Gaia as Mother Earth who both nurtured and destroyed her children. His theory posited the Earth as a self regulating system capable of ridding itself of a dangerously invasive species such as human beings. Such an idea brings Coupe’s radical typology into the heart of one of our most urgent debates. …
In his review in Green Letters Tom Bristow writes:
You may wish to fasten your seatbelt when you open Coupe’s revised edition of the Critical Idiom on myth but it is unnecessary, for this thoroughly engaging enquiry into the mechanics of myth and the methodological and ideological implications of mythology is not only wise and clear but highly accessible. Coupe’s two-part text aims to cast light upon the mythopoeic imagination by means of a critical examination of: (a) what it means to read myth – a form of practical criticism; and (b) what constitutes mythic reading – how the interpretation of myth can lend itself to the making of myths. In the final analyis, Coupe’s text contributes to an understanding of the dialectic between wonder and wisdom, the interface between theology and ecology, and how experiencing beings constitute their world. Most interestingly, it demonstrates the incredible potential presented by open interdisciplinary thought that mobilizes distinct studies … without abstraction into loose meditations on consciousness and its place in nature.
THE GREEN STUDIES READER: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (2000)
Green Studies is a booming area for study, and The Green Studies Reader is a comprehensive selection of critical texts which address the connection between ecology, culture, and literature. It offers a complete guide to the growing area of ‘ecocriticism’ and a wealth of material on green issues from the romantic period to the present. Included are extracts from today’s leading ecocritics and figures from the past who pioneered a green approach to literature and culture. This Reader sets the agenda for Green Studies and encourages a reassessment of the development of literary criticism and offers readers a radical view of its future.
Buy The Green Studies Reader from Amazon UK
The first study of Burke’s work on mythology, this book explains the relevance of his ideas on society as ‘ritual drama’, on ‘victimage’ and the sacrificial process, and above all on the link between mythology and ecology. The original book is no longer in print, but it has been revised and republished under a different name. See next item below.
Responses to THE GREEN STUDIES READER (2000)
Jonathan Bate concludes his foreword to the volume as follows:
The Green Studies Reader should take its place as a central text in any course on the relationship between literature and questions of ecology and environment. The editor has done a superb job in terms of both extracts chosen and organisational principles. For the first time, it is possible to see both the continuity and the variety of the traditions in which “green thinking” has emerged within literary culture. The theoretical, historical and practical exemplars collected in this book will stimulate new generations of students into new and vital reanimations and rethinkings of their literary inheritance.
Madeleine Minson in her review for the Times Higher Educational Supplement states:
Some 30 years after environmentalism became a force to be reckoned with in politics, it is finally making inroads into literary criticism. Urged on by the ever-growing threat to the planet – or indeed by the sheer love of nature – green theorists and critics are busy putting the physical environment centre stage, often with a view to effecting political change. Laurence Coupe’s Green Studies Reader provides an excellent overview of achievements to date in this emerging field. … [It] has the air of a pioneering publication. … With courses in ecocriticism beginning to appear in British universities, it should make a very good textbook indeed.
Peter Barry, in the final chapter of the second edition of his comprehensive and influential work, Beginning Theory (Manchester: MUP, 2002) recommends the book as follows:
This is the definitive UK collection, but it represents major contemporary American voices (Soper, Snyder, Slovic, Buell, Roszak, Glotfelty, etc) as well as British ones (Bate, Gifford, Garrard, Kerridge, etc), and includes early material from the Romantic period onwards. Fifty chapters, mostly quite short, in six well conceived and well introduced sections, so the book is kept to a sensible size of around 300 pages.
Kate Rigby, in the annotated bibliography to her lucid overview of ecological literary theory, which is included in Introducing Criticism of the 21st Century, edited by Julian Wolfrey (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), writes:
[The reader] is particularly valuable in that it embeds contemporary ecocritical research and reflection in a longer history of thinking about the relationship between nature and culture from romanticism through to the critique of modernity by twentieth-century writers and philosophers, such as D. H. Lawrence, Adorno and Horkheimer, and Heidegger. The second section on ‘Green Theory’ provides the basis for a more philosophically reflected ecocriticism by including work by critical theorists such as Kate Soper , Donna Haraway and Lyotard, while the final section provides a good range of examples of practical ecocriticism, including work on popular as well as canonical texts. Coupe’s general introduction and his introductions to each of the sections provide an excellent guide to the key questions motivating green theory and criticism today.
The entry on the reader in the Annotated Biblography of English Studies (2000) reads as follows:
Laurence Coupe’s Green Studies Reader provides an excellent overview of achievements to date in this emerging field . . . Coupe’s anthology is a wide-ranging introduction to a thriving branch of literary study. The extracts are brief and well-chosen, and the wealth of introductory material is always informative. It should make a very good textbook, but it is also a stimulating collection for anyone interested in the fruitful intersection between environmentalism and literature.
See also the various YouTube videos on Ecocriticism / Green Studies which mention the Green Studies Reader. For example: ‘What is Ecocriticism/ Green Studies?| Ecocriticism Definition, Meaning & Explanation’
KENNETH BURKE ON MYTH: An Introduction (2005)
The first study of Burke’s work on mythology, this book explains the relevance of his ideas on society as ‘ritual drama’, on ‘victimage’ and the sacrificial process, and above all on the link between mythology and ecology. The original book is no longer in print, but it has been revised and republished under a different name. See next item below. Kenneth Burke on Myth takes very seriously Burke’s classic definition of the human being: ‘the symbol-using (symbol-misusing) animal’ who is ‘rotten with perfection’. That is, his/her ‘words’ always seem to gesture towards some absolute ‘Word’, regardless of whether religious belief is involved.
*** Please note: This edition is out of print. I am, however, leaving this information as it stands because the book forms the basis of Kenneth Burke: From Myth to Ecology. Please see below.
KENNETH BURKE: FROM MYTH TO ECOLOGY (2013)
Kenneth Burke: From Myth to Ecology is a pioneering study of a remarkable thinker’s approach to those founding narratives, those essential structures of thought, which cannot be credited to any one individual but rather belong to the whole community.
As such, it explores the way Burke developed an increasingly ‘green’ perspective on the stories we tell one another in order to make sense of our world.
In celebrating Burke’s achievement, Coupe presents us with a complete picture of a mind which is comprehensive, compassionate, and ‘comic’.
For Burke, myth is the chief means by which humanity can come to terms with itself and its own dangerous ambitions. Hence to be alert to the way myth functions is to become responsible towards the planet which is our home. In emphasising this aspect of Burke’s work, Coupe argues that Burke’s theory of myth is urgently contemporary.
Buy KENNETH BURKE: FROM MYTH TO ECOLOGY (Parlor Press, 2013) on Amazon UK
This is a revised version of Kenneth Burke on Myth.
Responses to KENNETH BURKE ON MYTH (2005) — earlier version of this volume
In his review for the KB Journal Daniel Smith writes:
Following his introductory remarks, Coupe performs a virtuoso reading of Burke that spans five chapters. … One of the most intriguing parts of this final chapter is Coupe’s suggestion—one carried over into the book’s conclusion—that Burke himself can be considered a mythmaker, and that the rhetorical re-iteration and performance of myth can be a viable form of transformative social action.
Coupe’s Burke-inspired ideas about the transformative potentials of myth embraces the para-religious dimensions of Burke’s thought, something avoided by many Burkeans. He doesn’t describe it as such, but Coupe extracts from Burke’s corpus what might be called a comic religiosity, which is quite open to learning from Eastern and Western religious and spiritual traditions but at the same time makes it quite difficult for its ‘followers’ to be self-righteousness or dogmatic.
Whatever readers of Coupe’s book may think of the content of its argument—and there is substantial content to engage—it is difficult to deny that Coupe’s project performs for us something all too rare in Burke scholarship: the embodiment of Burke’s ‘impious’ and comically religious spirit. And this, finally, is what makes Kenneth Burke on Myth a must-read.
Susan Rowland in her review for Harvest: International Journal for Jungian Studies writes:
Coupe’s book is a wonderfully lucid introduction to a now neglected thinker. In showing the importance of Burke to the modern world, he also demonstrates why we need to look again at those thinkers who, like Jung, offer a re-evaluation of the religious impulse in man. It matters to this century even more than to the last.
Responses to KENNETH BURKE: FROM MYTH TO ECOLOGY (2013)
1.In her review in Green Letters, Isabel Galleymore writes:
Aware of Burke’s focus upon the human as distinct from the non-human (through the ‘symbolic act’) and how this may appear anthropocentric, Coupe makes sure to explain that Burke ‘wishes to put humanity in its place’. .. Coupe advocates Burke’s ‘Nature’ and ‘Supernature’ as essential to the corrective process. After all, ‘Nature’ puts the human in his/her place with regard to human life and ‘Supernature’ puts the human in his/her place by recognising and revealing the human need for a spiritual beyond. Such acknowledgement of the importance of Nature, as well as nature, forms a refreshing and thought-provoking conclusion that challenges recent green scholarship influenced by Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature.
2.Dave Measel gives a lively assessment of the book on YouTube:
MARINA WARNER (2006)
This book on Marina Warner is informed by my conviction that myths are not fixed in stone but are constantly open to re-reading and re-telling. Warner has, of course, shown how both can be done: through works of cultural history such as Managing Monsters and through novels such as Indigo.
NOTE ON BACK COVER:
Marina Warner is such a widely celebrated writer that it is a source of some wonderment that this is the first full-length study of her work. Perhaps that is because she is so hard to characterise. For example, she is an English writer yet she has an international perspective on her country. Also, she is a novelist who is rooted in traditional forms such as myth and fairy tale yet who is wholly contemporary in her thinking. Again, her vision is secular, yet in both her critical and creative writing she returns again and again to the idea of the sacred or supernatural. Above all, she has an equally strong sense of myth and of history, their interaction being the basis of her fiction and the focus of her scholarship.In sum, she is a wonderfully ambitious and challenging writer whose contribution has yet to be assessed. What is required now is a systematic survey of her oeuvre, book by book: this latest volume in the ‘Writers and their Work’ series is written to supply this need. The first study of this contemporary novelist and cultural historian, this book explores the structure and symbolism of her fiction, and demonstrates the connection between her various reflections on the question of female representation, on fairy tales and horror, and above all on myth and history.
Please note that it is not customary for volumes in the ‘Writers and Their Work’ series to be reviewed, but my Marina Warner (2006) has been frequently cited and recommended.
Buy Marina Warner from Amazon UK
BEAT SOUND, BEAT VISION: The Beat spirit and popular Song (2007)
This book reveals the ideas behind the Beat vision which influenced the Beat sound of the songwriters who followed on from them.
Having explored the thinking of Alan Watts, who coined the term ‘Beat Zen’, and who influenced the counterculture which emerged out of the Beat movement, it celebrates Jack Kerouac as a writer in pursuit of a ‘beatific’ vision.
On this basis, the book goes on to explain the relevance of Kerouac and his friends Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder to songwriters who emerged in the 1960s. Not only are new, detailed readings of the lyrics of the Beatles and of Dylan given, but the range and depth of the Beat legacy within popular song is indicated by way of an overview of some important innovators: Jim Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Donovan, the Incredible String Band, Van Morrison and Nick Drake.
While this may seem at first sight to be a deviation from my earlier themes, I should stress that the book addresses the recurrent theme of the interplay of ‘the sacred and the profane’ – the two dimensions of all religious experience, according to the historian of religion, Mircea Eliade. The Beat writers were obsessed by the possibility of apprehending the spiritual dimension of the everyday, ‘fallen’ world. In Buddhist terms, this means recognising the identity of ‘nirvana’ and ‘samsara’. Alan Watts and Gary Snyder are particularly impressive in the way they effect this in their own writings. Again, in the final chapter, entitled “‘Eco-Zen’, or ‘a heaven in a wild flower'”, I bring my interest in mythology and my interest in ecology together, in assessing the Beat legacy within the work of a wide variety of sixties songwriters. The ‘green’ emphasis, I argue, began with the Beats and was developed by Joni Mitchell and others.
Responses to BEAT SOUND, BEAT VISION (2007)
Brian Dalton in his review for Beat Scene writes:
It must be a sign of the times. Laurence Coupe meshing writers such as Jack Kerouac, Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, Leonard Cohen, William Blake alongside musical iconic figures such as Jim Morrison of The Doors, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Nick Drake and others. It must be a delightful development for many to read about, seeing this line of descent, this family tree approach to how things grow. In a series of articulate essays Coupe stretches out his ideas and linkages, investigating who inspired who, casting Alan Watts in a central role alongside the omnipotent William Blake. … Some of Coupe’s theories are contentious but from this uniquely English perspective they are absolutely thought provoking.
Susan Rowland in her review for Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture writes:
There are secret histories. Even in the most flagrant and ostentatious of arts, popular music from the 1960s, there are secret, because unconsidered, affiliations and invocations. There are secret histories folded up in words as the etymologists and the rhetoricians knew. So what does it mean that ‘Beatles’ contains ‘Beat’ as in Beat poets? There are secret histories and histories of secrets, as Laurence Coupe shows in this stunning and authoritative new work. His book on the Beat poets, popular music and the secret traditions they espoused, encompasses mythology, Zen, the perennial philosophy, and a quest for the sacred. …
Beat Sound, Beat Vision is a work of tremendous cultural imagination itself in revealing the vertical and horizontal paradoxes of the Beat vision. Reaching back into ecological myths of a sacred feminine earth, forward to condemn capitalism’s destruction of it, outwards to recognize, honour and mourn the other Native American culture, Beat Sound, Beat Vision brings a healing scholarship to the complex, corrupted yet still vibrant picture of popular culture of the last fifty years. All those who seek to belong to the truthful in our own age, who seek art that offers a sense of the sacred to the collective, all of us should read this book.