Rise of Modern Mythology, 1680-1860

Burton Feldman, Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Denver, has also taught at the University of Chicago and Hebrew University. He has contributed articles on 18th-19th century mythology to the Dictionary ofthe History of Ideas and The Encyclopedia of Religion, and (with Robert D. Richardson) has edited and introduced Myth and Romanticism, a 50-volume set of sources for English Romantic writers.Robert D. Richardson, Jr. is an independent scholar and literary biographer who currently divides his time between Middletown, Connecticut, Key West, and Cape Cod. He has taught at Harvard, the University of Denver, theUniversity of Colorado, Queens College and the Graduate Center of CUNY, Sichuan University in China, Yale, and Wesleyan. He is author of Literature and Film, Myth and Literature in the American Renaissance, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, and Emerson: The Mind on Fire. He edited (with Allen Mandelbaum) Three Centuries of American Poetry and is working on a biography of William James.

" ... peerless ... " --The Key Reporter " ... this book is a first. It will be a standard ... Comprehensiveness as well as the clarity of the headnotes should make it endure." -Choice " ... so good as it stands ... one should simply be happy to have it." --The Journal of the History of Ideas " ... an original, compendious, and highly useful contribution to historical and mythographical scholarship." --The American Scholar "The Rise of Modern Mythology is a voice of reason in the contemporary maelstrom of international religious violence and American pluralism more than any book I know, it exposes the roots of the Western appropriation of non-Western mythologies, from Lawrence of Arabia and Omar Khayyam to Tibetan Buddhism in Hollywood and Krishna Consciousness in airports. This is a book we need now." --Wendy Doniger "There will be no book like it in English for some time to come, with the amplitude or conception of the anthology... Without question the book takes its place as a standard work in the field." --Journal of the History of Ideas "... a useful contribution to the history of myth scholarship in several scholarly traditions... this collection certainly deserves an audience among folklorists, anthropologists, and others in the humanities and social sciences who enjoy the mythology of myth in Western intellectual history."--American Anthropologist

• Abridged Table of ContentsForeword by Wendy Doniger 1972 Foreword by Mircea EliadeAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart One / The Earlier Eighteenth CenturyPart Two / The Later Eighteenth CenturyPart Three / The Nineteenth Century to 1860Bibliography on Works on Myth, 1680-1860IndexJG