Frontmatter -- Foreword -- Contents -- Introduction: Myth in the Modern Novel? -- Part I: Assimilation and Amalgamation: Myth and Modernity -- Chapter 1 Imagining the Absolute: Herder's Rehabilitation of Myth -- Chapter 2 The Early Romantic Idea of a New Mythology: Poeticising the World in Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen -- Chapter 3 Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers: The Myth of Evolving Humanity -- Chapter 4 The Material Imagination in Michel Tournier's Friday -- Chapter 5 From Traditional to Modern Use of Tribal Myths in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony -- Chapter 6 Torgny Lindgren: Religious Mythopoiesis and Its Modern Surrogates -- Part II: Maintaining the Distinction: Myth or Modernity -- Chapter 7 The Night Side of Nature in E. T. A. Hoffmann's The Devil's Elixirs -- Chapter 8 Myth and Science in Zola's Naturalism -- Chapter 9 Germanness and Mythic Evil in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus -- Chapter 10 Christa Wolf's Cassandra and Medea: Myth as a Disguise for a Critique of Contemporary Society -- Chapter 11 Milan Kundera: The Search beyond Myth for the Authentic Individual -- Conclusion: Coming to Terms with Myth -- Literature -- Name Index

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Myth in the Modern Novel: Imagining the Absolute posits a twofold thesis. First, although Modernity is regarded as an era dominated by science and rational thought, it has in fact not relinquished the hold of myth, a more "primitive" form of thought which is difficult to reconcile with modern rationality. Second, some of the most important statements as to the reconcilability of myth and Modernity are found in the work of certain prominent novelists. This book offers a close examination of the work of eleven writers from the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, representing German, French, American, Czech and Swedish literature. The analyses of individual novels reveal a variety of intriguing views of myth in Modernity, and offer an insight into the "modernizing" transformations myth has undergone when applied in the modern novel. The study shows the presence of the "subconscious", the mythic layer, in modern western culture and how this has been dealt with in novelistic literature.

Issued also in print.

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Liisa Steinby, University of Turku, Finland.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed March 03 2026)