Myth and Literature in the American Renaissance

by Robert D. Richardson Jr.

Explores the work of Parker, Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville to illuminate the use, tradition, and character of myth in nineteenth-century American literature

309 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1978

About the author

The son of a Unitarian minister, Robert Dale Richardson III grew up in Massachusetts and earned his bachelor's and doctorate degrees in English at Harvard University. Richardson taught at a number of colleges, including the University of Denver and Wesleyan University.

Reviews

[Carnegie Olson · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Authentic tidings of invisible things." Such is Richardson's definition, he may allow me to convey, of myth. Similarly, I like to describe myth as true fiction. Within this book, MYTH AND LITERATURE, then, reside these two powerfully resonant, indelibly effecting and affecting themes.

I myself had enjoyed, cherished really, Burton and Richardson's THE RISE OF MODERN MYTHOLOGY so much that I was inspired to seek out more by these two outstanding mythographers. I gravitated towards Richardson in particular and read his biography of William James, a treat indeed, and infused with Richardson's acute intuition regarding the special place that myth holds within... well, within all things. This book, MYTH AND LITERATURE, however, is very special; so much so, to me at least, that I did not want it to end and it resides alongside Campbell's HERO and MASKS as part of the essential motivating architecture of my own work. Richardson, in short, gets it in terms of mythology. While he himself lamented that his academic publications amounted to mere printed monographs for PhD colleagues (meaning nobody else read them) he seemed to maintain a real affection for his mythography work, even when he had long since abandoned it for his well regarded career as an intellectual biographer.

But what of this book? Richardson as a mythographer (as opposed to Campbell, say, who is a comparative mythologist) studies the historiography or history of ideas of myth. As such, when I had written Mr. Richardson about THE RISE he replied, "Yours is one of the best letters I have ever received about that book, which was reviewed by a friend Robert Ackerman as a masterpiece for a non-existent field; mythography is however a real subject...." Indeed. And he continued his work within MYTH AND LITERATURE.

Richardson was a brilliant, very gracious man and it was with profound dismay that I discovered today that he died two months ago, in June, two days after his 86th birthday. Rather than gush and gush, then, about this little book or spiral into long-winded intellectualizing or, heaven forbid, any type of dismal eulogy I'd rather simply quote from MTYH AND LITERATURE:

"We are familiar with the idea of incarnating the invisible in the visible as a religious conception, but it can also be thought of as a literary process, a fictional technique, which I call mythic investiture and which can be seen at work in Melville's handling of the white whale. Although we never lose sight of the fact that Moby Dick is simply a large albino sperm whale, it is, from the start, the idea of the great white whale that compels us as it compels Ishmael. We see the whale through a veil of rumor, scholarship, legend, and myth; by imperceptible degrees we come to acquiesce in the appropriateness of such things, and we eventually find ourselves regarding the whale as something more than a whale" (212-213).

Mythic investiture. Yes. Meanwhile, if you study mythology either by way of comparativism or, akin to Richardson by way of mythography (or both, like me), you will be enchanted by this essential book. May it lead you onwards.