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America’s expectations of its soldiers were lofty coming out of the Second World War. Men in uniform would struggle against global evils, defeat them, and return strengthened by the struggle. If necessary, they would give their lives for the survival of a greater good. These expectations, conveyed powerfully in films of the era, affected Francis Gary Powers, who entered the Air Force in 1950 and became a fighter pilot. This chapter describes Powers’ involvement in one of the most troubling civil religious dramas of the Cold War. Shot down while flying a U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union, Powers survived, stood trial, and apologized to the Soviets for what he had done. For this, numerous commentators in the U.S. lambasted him. This episode and its aftermath illuminate the power of civil religious rituals, the importance of proper soldierly performances in those rituals, and the consequences American soldiers have faced for improper ritual performances.

This chapter attempts to bridge the current theoretical movements in posthumanism with those in mythology, in examining how people view non-human life, and their relations to them. New developments in animal studies have revolutionized the way scholars perceive of non-hominid mental lives and abilities, which has led to challenges to traditional Western beliefs and practices. To illustrate the cultural concepts at play, this chapter utilizes to a comparative American (Native vs. non-Native) view of mythology, science, and language.

This essay focuses on introducing students in an American Studies intensive writing freshman seminar on southern women writers to the cultural context of Eudora Welty’s first volume A Curtain of Green (1942) and its recurring motifs of confinement and rebellion. The course begins with a showing of the film Gone with the Wind and Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to introduce students to the cultural mythology of southern womanhood and its lasting impact upon American culture, from stereotypes of black and white womanhood reified in American culture by Hollywood to revisions and parodies produced by writers ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Alice Randall and Eudora Welty herself. Hence the course situates Welty’s short stories within a tradition of southern black and white women writers critical of the region’s mythology of womanhood, the color line, and segregation’s hypervisual culture of surveillance.

This chapter begins the third part of the book, which aims to present the belief systems and ritual practices associated with Durgā. Through these beliefs, which conveyed the myth of civilization and imperial kingship for independent rulers to cultivate, the cult made itself meaningful to its adherents. Among beliefs of heroic Śāktism there was, firstly, the belief that a goddess had granted investiture to a king, secondly, the belief that a king defeated in battle would regain power through a goddess, and thirdly, the belief that a goddess was to be worshipped in times of war. These are expressed among various examples of literature from poetry to inscriptions, in versions of the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata that include scenes with Durgā aiding Rāma and the Pāṇḍava brothers, thereby showcasing her role in aiding the deserving hero. The chapter turns to the visual symbols and palladia whereby the relationship of king and goddess was made palpable for inhabitants of a kingdom, exploring rituals of goddess-empowered swords, crests, and fortresses, and chariot processions, whereby the protective, triumphant, militaristic and defensive aspects of Durgā's personality were manifested and enlivened within each and every aspect of a medieval city.

The concluding chapter brings us back to the present, placing the ‘War on Terror’ in the context of the discourse of evil. To what extent is our understanding of terrorism shaped by the idea of monstrous evil, such that we can use whatever means necessary – including torture – to protect ourselves from it? The books concludes that the idea of ‘evil’ is a ‘black-hole’ concept, which gives the illusion of explanation, when it in fact represents the failure to understand. The idea of evil is not a philosophical one, but belongs in mythology. When we describe an agent as ‘evil’ we place them within this mythological narrative, in which they have no history, and no motivation other than the wish to harm us. The solution is to abandon the discourse of evil altogether, and move towards new ways of understanding human character and action.

This chapter explores the aesthetic and political impulses behind the depiction of Venice in Pound’s Canto 26, written in the mid 1920s. In Canto 26, I argue, Pound responds to a contemporary city reinvigorated in his mind by the advent of Mussolini’s Fascism. Pound’s references to Venice’s history and its imperial past may be read in the context of Fascism’s renewed emphasis on this history, which it used in the service of a contemporary ideology of Italian expansionism. In contrast to some critics’ emphasis on the negative aspects of Venetian history explored in Pound’s work, I argue that he saw the city as a meeting-place for art and politics, a connection revived (disturbingly) by the Fascist regime that he was increasingly drawn to. By way of a comparison with Pound’s friends and fellow poets T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats, the chapter contends that the Canto attempts to forge its own (modernist) mythology, bringing together aesthetics and politics, Renaissance history and the contemporary world.

Presenting a survey of the genre of the artist biopic, this chapter investigates which specific artists and art historical eras proved attractive to filmmakers. Favouring the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on the one hand and the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the other, artist biopics heavily depend on the Renaissance notion of the artist as an exceptional individual and the Romantic idea of the artist as a misunderstood genius, who not only rejects artistic conventions but also leads a life determined by poverty, alcohol, pangs of love, venereal diseases, fits of insanity, self-mutilation, crime and suicide. Cinema unmistakably endorses the stereotypical artist's personality, which is the subject of many myths and anecdotes. Reminiscent of the strategies used in the art documentaries discussed in the first chapter, artist biopics mobilize or animate static paintings and sculptures. As a result, artist biopics favour but often also struggle with scenes involving the act of artistic creation. Specifically, this chapter also examines two films, both hovering between documentary and fiction, which focus on the act of creation of a specific painting: Hazan's A Bigger Splash and Erice's Dream of Light (The Quince Tree Sun), featuring David Hockney and Antonio Lopez Garcia respectively.

Ancient concepts of the person emerge not only from philosophical works but from literature and myth. Using a contemporary painting by the artist Erika Meriaux, this reflection focuses on the mythological story of the Minotaur, a creature who awkwardly straddles the boundary between human and animal, between person and nonperson. The Minotaur foreshadows modern anxiety about boundary cases: the clever dolphin or mentally challenged child. What obligations are owed to such a being? Meriaux's painting follows in the footsteps of some ancient writers in emphasizing the monster's human characteristics; yet he remains stubbornly bovine. Is it possible to be a person without being human? Meriaux's depiction challenges us to respond but leaves the answer up to us

Toward the end of the nineteenth century a mythology of the Civil War veteran had been created. This myth was partially constructed by former soldiers who asserted they were the last real men in America. Middle-class white young men resented this claim that veterans held a monopoly over American manhood and sought ways to access social power and prestige. Since war had presumably made veterans into powerful social figures, the rising generation increasingly sought to understand the transformative power of war on these men and, failing that, to find a war of their own. This trend is reflected in the writing of Stephen Crane, who initially attempts in The Red Badge of Courage to intellectually understand how war makes men but then abandons this to find a battle of his own in the Spanish–American War.

The social and cultural authority that images exercised in medieval Byzantium derived in part from their consistent observance of established traditions of representation. As a result of this tendency toward recognisable types, when an intentional departure from visual conventions was introduced, Byzantine viewers could be expected to notice the difference and wonder about the intentions behind it. This chapter explores how Graeco-Roman mythological and romance narratives offered opportunities for the engineering of amusing imagery through strategies of inversion and exaggeration. It focuses especially on how this up-ending of visual conventions served to disrupt the expected order of gender relations. The chapter shows how the programmes of middle Byzantine works of classicising art used humour initially to destabilize – but ultimately to reaffirm -- social norms surrounding female sexuality.

The opening question of this final chapter on Daniel Varuzhan's poetry is: What is the name of the “enemy” that destroyed the world of the ancient gods and condemned us to live under the spell of their disaster? The answer is, strangely enough, Christianity. The chapter offers a parallel with Hölderlin's late elegies and his dealing with the categoric (and catastrophic) “turning away” of the gods. The final question is: How to think the disaster without aesthetics, how to think mourning outside the essential relation to the “end of religion“? The chapter then delineates the necessity of working against the aesthetic matrix in order to receive the Catastrophe into the language of thought. The concluding section examines the 19th century debate on the “peoples without religion,” which begins with Schelling and goes all the way down to Max Müller, Ignaz Goldziher (the author of a book on Hebrew mythology), and the representatives of an evolutionist theory of religion.

The Introduction outlines the book in terms of contemporary film scholarship on the Western. The broader aim here is to set the book in the present before outlining the history of the two main evolutionary approaches taken to the genre, describing how, despite influential critical responses to this approach having been advanced in recent decades, more film scholars still adhere to these approaches than do question them. The Introduction also describes how the version of frontier mythology most closely associated with the Western, in both of the genre's so-call classical and revisionist phases, was deliberately constructed on the cusp of the twentieth century by a handful of interconnected historians, politicians and producers of popular culture; namely, William Cody, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Theodore Roosevelt. But what is the nature of the Western's relationship to the myth? The Introduction ends by considering this question before outlining the films and defining of the terms of analysis that the book will use.

The final chapter concentrates on The Waves, returning to Wagner and to Woolf’s formal and political engagement with his work. Providing a close reading of the novel’s parallels to Das Rheingold, it argues that Woolf’s innovative text is indebted to the structure and imagery of Wagner’s Ring cycle but that Woolf critiques Wagner’s use of mythology and symbolism. It proposes that the novel resists the generalizing pull of (Wagnerian) mythology, grounding its own symbols in the particular and historically specific. Woolf’s use of music illustrates her perception of the appeal and the dangers of music’s ‘generalised’ language; the novel also reflects on the relationship between music and heroism.

Chapter I examines the relationship between Mudimbe’s intellectual training among the Benedictines and his subsequent critique of the colonial and neo-colonial orders. What is at issue here is his ability to mobilise creatively the ‘old’ knowledge of the ‘colonial library’ – biblical exegesis, religious and missionary/Christian history, ethnography (Baluba mythology), and Greco-Latin philology and mythology – to challenge (via Foucault, Lévi-Strauss, and Herodotus) the historical and political myths and ideological ‘fables’ which have since the Renaissance contributed to African evangelisation and historiography, the idea of Africa, the construction of sectarian identity politics in contemporary Congo-Zaire, and the indigenization of the Bible by clerics such as Placide Tempels. Main texts under discussion: L’Autre Face du royaume (1973), Entre les eaux (1973), The Invention of Africa (1988), Shaba II (1989), Parables and Fables (1991), The Idea of Africa (1994), Les Corps glorieux (1994), Tales of Faith (1997) and Carnets de Berlin (2006).

The Urdu ghazal is truly an Indian invention. Although initially it borrowed themes and legendary references from the Persian and Arab cultures, with the passage of time it became the mirror-image of blended Indian culture. The chapter explains how the ghazal incorporates Indian mythologies like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, social and geographical features like rivers, festivals, customs and rituals, flowers and flowering trees, birds and animals, seasons and climate, cities and places, and finally music and ragas.

The third chapter discusses H. Usener’s (1834–1905) theory of Augenblicks- and Sondergötter. This theory, which may be seen as the contrasting pole to the theory of universal gods, provided a subversive account of the origins and development of Indo-European polytheisms, based on a comparative study of Greek, Roman, and Lithuanian deities. Emphasis is placed on the contemporary religious implications of Usener’s views and, especially, on his criticism of Catholic beliefs and practices.