Mythic Worlds, Modern Words - Joseph Campbell, Edmund L. Epstein & David Kudler
By Joseph Campbell, Edmund L. Epstein & David Kudler
Release Date: 2020-05-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
In 1927, as a twenty-three-year-old postgraduate scholar in Paris, Joseph Campbell first encountered James Joyceâs Ulysses. Known for being praised and for kicking up controversy (including an obscenity trial in the United States in 1920), the novel left Campbell both intrigued and confused, as it had many others. Because he was in Paris, he was able to visit the Shakespeare & Company bookstoreâthe outpost of the original publisher of Ulysses, Sylvia Beach. She gave him âcluesâ for reading Ulysses, and that, Campbell attested, changed his career. For the next sixty years, Campbell moved through the labyrinths of Joyceâs creationsâwriting and lecturing on Joyce using depth psychology, comparative religion, anthropology, and art history as tools of analysis.
Arranged by Joyce scholar Edmund L. Epstein, Mythic Worlds, Modern Wordspresents a wide range of Campbellâs writing and lectures on Joyce, which together form an illuminating running commentary on Joyceâs masterworks. Campbellâs visceral appreciation for all that was new in Joyce will delight the previously uninitiated, and perhaps intimidated, as well as longtime lovers of both Joyce and Campbell. Now available in a trade paperback edition, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words is a masters meet-up between the twentieth centuryâs quintessential mythologist and its most exemplary literary modernist. Forty years of Campbellâs lectures, articles and unpublished writings on the novels of James Joyce, drawn together by Joycean scholar Edmund L. Epstein, serve as a lens to examine both the nature of myth in art, and the myriad-minded work of the man whom many have called the greatest literary artist of the modern era.
An appendix includes both question and answer sessions from Campbellâs lectures, and a series of articles penned by Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson (co-author with Campbell of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake), unveiling the Wake-like themes that suffused Thorton Wilderâs Broadway hit, The Skin of Our Teeth.
Mythic Worlds, Modern Words - Joseph Campbell, Edmund L. Epstein & David Kudler
By Joseph Campbell, Edmund L. Epstein & David Kudler
Release Date: 2020-05-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
