How We Lost Our Appreciation of Myth and Why We Should Try to Get It Back

When I read this essay about the early 20th-century literary critic Northrop Frye I didn’t expect it to be the sort of thing that would fit into this newsletter. But it is. First, because anything by the gifted scholar Alan Jacobs is usually worth recommending. And second because its primary concern is with myth, and how we think about the role myths play in literature, in human society, and in our conceptions of ourselves. The most important myths—by which Jacobs, like Frye, means not false tales but stories of enduring cultural and symbolic meaning—in human history may well be those of the Hebrew Bible. For Frye and his successors, for decades considered passé in English departments, myth was the key to understanding literature: