Mythic Thinking in Twentieth-Century Britain: Meaning for Modernity

Mythic Thinking in Twentieth-Century Britain is the first cultural and intellectual history of myth as a mode of thought in modern Britain. Focusing on the period 1900-1980, it examines how a variety of thinkers and cultural groups used the concept of myth to articulate their anxieties about modernity and seek meaning within it. Mythic thinking was thus a profoundly modern response to what W.H. Auden called 'the modern problem' - the erosion of traditional meaning-creating structures and institutions. This book tells the story of mythic thinking in Britain from its origins in late-Victorian social anthropology to its cultural mainstreaming in the postwar period. It is a story that reveals the persistence of yearning for transcendent meaning in age that has often been assumed by historians to be 'disenchanted' and thoroughly secularized.