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.