myth criticism

myth criticism, a kind of literary interpretation that regards literary works as expressions or embodiments of recurrent mythic patterns and structures, or of ‘timeless’ archetypes. Myth criticism, which flourished in the 1950s and 1960s, is less interested in the specific qualities of a given work than in those features of its narrative structure or symbolism that seem to connect it to ancient myths and religions. An important precedent for many myth‐critical studies was J. G. Frazer's speculative anthropological work The Golden Bough (1890–1915), which proposed a cycle of death and rebirth found in fertility cults as the common basis for several mythologies. The mostinfluential modern myth critic, Northrop Frye, translated this hypothesis into a universal scheme of literary history in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), in which the major narrative genres are related to theseasonal cycle. Other leading myth critics have included Gaston Bachelard, Richard Chase, and Leslie Fiedler. More recently, myth criticism has been widely dismissed as a form of reductionism that neglects cultural and historical differences as well as the specific properties of literary works.