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Abstract

Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu être triste pour ressusciter Carthage. 1 This issue of the MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities is comprised of seven compelling articles whose heterogeneous reflections on the notion of myth take in Homer and Hesiod, the druids and the Virgin Mary. What"s more, they address the rewriting of various myths across a broad range of research areas, from medieval Irish to Scottish Modernism, and from incipient Romanticism to French feminism of the 1960s. Each avoids the pitfalls of seeing literature as a passive relayer of myths or as a simple debunker of them, instead engaging in complex debates on the reception and historicity of various strands of myth. These are some of the reasons why each article deserves to be read in its own right.The notion of myth as a reinscription of the past in the present, of the other in the same is relevant across the articles, for instance for Ken Keir, who shows how "modernist mythical writing thus becomes modern through the past". This can be seen in the recurrence of myths both through retelling and the (re)appearance of archetypal figures. Both Keir"s and Mark Ryan"s contributions touch upon the concept of the archetype, a phenomenon with a strangely double nature as its significance is open to questioning and re-appropriation, while it nonetheless retains a certain timeless quality. Jung elaborates on this paradox:The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a facultas praeformandi, a possibility of representation which is given a priori. The 1 Flaubert quoted by Walter Benjamin in the "Theses on the Philosophy of History" in Illuminations, ed. by