Myth literary term

 

MYTH

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In ancient Greece, the term “Mythos” signified any story or plot, whether true or false. Today, a myth is one story in mythology – a system of hereditary to be true by a particular cultural group. These stories served to explain in terms of the intentions and actions of supernatural beings. Why the world is as it is and things happen as they do. Most myths involve rituals prescribed forms of sacred ceremonials. If the protagonist is a man rather than a supernatural being, the story is not called myth but legend. If the story concerns supernatural beings but is not a part of a systematic mythology, it is usually called folk tale.

A Mythology, we can say, is any religion in which we no longer believe. Poets however use the myths of Jupiter, Venus, Prometheus and Adam and Eve for their plots or episodes.

In England, William Blake incorporated in his poems a mythology he had himself created by fusing hereditary myths with his own intuitions and visions. A number of modern writers have asserted that a mythology weather inherited or invented is essential to literature. James Joyce in “Ulysses” and T.S.Eliot in “The Waste Land” have deliberately woven their modern materials on the pattern of ancient myths. Myth has become one of the prominent terms in contemporary literary theories. A large group of critics and writers known as “The Myth critics” including Robert Graves and Northrop Frye view the genres and individual plot patterns of all literature, what on the surface are highly sophisticated and realistic works as recurrencies of certain archetypes and essential mathematics formulas.

In addition to the above mentioned meanings the uses of the term myth range from a widely held fallacy (for example the American success myth) solidly imagined realm in which a work of fiction is enacted (for example the mythical world of “Moby Dick”)