The Rise of Modern Mythology, 1680-1860 - Paperback

by Burton Feldman (Author), Robert D. Richardson (Author)

" . . . peerless . . . " --The Key Reporter

" . . . this book is a first. It will be a standard . . . Comprehensiveness as well as the clarity of the headnotes should make it endure." --Choice

" . . . so good as it stands . . . one should simply be happy to have it." --The Journal of the History of Ideas

" . . . an original, compendious, and highly useful contribution to historical and mythographical scholarship." --The American Scholar

"The Rise of Modern Mythology is a voice of reason in the contemporary maelstrom of international religious violence and American pluralism; more than any book I know, it exposes the roots of the Western appropriation of non-Western mythologies, from Lawrence of Arabia and Omar Khayyam to Tibetan Buddhism in Hollywood and Krishna Consciousness in airports. This is a book that we need now." --Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions, The University of Chicago

Back Jacket

In this critical history of the rise and development of interest in myth from 1680 to 1860, sixty selections from authors of the period show how most of the current theories about myth were ""anticipated, indeed proposed, debated, analyzed, and elaborated"" during these years. The authors provide critical introductions with bibliographies for the individual selections and a general bibliography of works on myth published from 1680 to 1860.

Author Biography

Burton Feldman, Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Denver, has also taught at the University of Chicago and Hebrew University. He has contributed articles on 18th-19th century mythology to the Dictionary of
the History of Ideas and The Encyclopedia of Religion, and (with Robert D. Richardson) has edited and introduced Myth and Romanticism, a 50-volume set of sources for English Romantic writers.

Robert D. Richardson, Jr. is an independent scholar and literary biographer who currently divides his time between Middletown, Connecticut, Key West, and Cape Cod. He has taught at Harvard, the University of Denver, the
University of Colorado, Queens College and the Graduate Center of CUNY, Sichuan University in China, Yale, and Wesleyan. He is author of Literature and Film, Myth and Literature in the American Renaissance, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, and Emerson: The Mind on Fire. He edited (with Allen Mandelbaum) Three Centuries of American Poetry and is working on a biography of William James.