Social myth, material reality, and the aesthetico-ideological functions of art

pp. 33-47

in: Tudor Balinisteanu, Violence, narrative and myth in Joyce and Yeats, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

The romantic inventors of ‘myth’, theorists and poets alike, consciously construct it as a privileged site in the modern agon between belief and disbelief. And the history of the new concept remains during the nineteenth century largely the record of an intensifying struggle between what Schlegel called ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘irony’. On one hand, the notion of ‘myth’ as vehicle of access to transcendence becomes increasingly reified in middle-class culture, particularly in literary circles. On the other, this success generates the first major counterattacks, the critiques that culminate in Marx and Nietzsche. (Von Hendy, 2002, p. 49)