Modernist Mythopoeia argues that the experimental modernist form of mythopoeia was directed towards expressing a range of metaphysical perspectives that fall between material secularism and dogmatic religion. The book is a timely addition to the 'post-secular' debate as well as to the 'return of religion' in modernist studies.Introduction: Modernist Mythopoeia: The Language of the In-Between and of Beyond 1. Zarathustra: Nietzsche's New Redeemer 2. 'Hieronymo's mad againe': The Waste Land as Tragic Mythopoeia 3. Kafka's Sick Ovidian Animals 4. Hilda Doolittle & D. H. Lawrence: Polytheistic & Pagan Revisionary Mythopoeia 5. 'Death is the mother of beauty': Wallace Stevens' Harmonium Bibliography Index
Dr Scott Freer is an independent scholar and an associate lecturer for The Open University, Vaughan College, UK, and the University of Leicester, UK.
Stylish, sophisticated and scholarly. - Professor Phil Shaw, University of Leicester, UK
Modernist use of myth went from the enigmatic to the banal without the intervening stage of being understood. Recent resurgence of interest in myth, however, allows for more searching and discriminating treatment as Scott Freer's book shows. His close discussion of a variety of modernist writers (Nietzsche, T. S. Eliot, Kafka, Lawrence, Hilda Doolittle and Wallace Stevens) brings out the differing conceptions of myth in literary writers of the period and places the topic within a larger context of modern philosophical aesthetics. - Emeritus Professor Michael Bell, University of Warwick, UK