The Modern Construction of Myth [Review]

The Modern Construction of Myth, by Andrew yon Hendy, is an interdisciplinary survey of the construction of myth in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The author\u27s thesis is that modern theories of myth can be divided into three broad groups, folkloristic, ideological, and constitutive, and that they all derive from an original, romantic, construct. The survey is organized diachronically, with some attention to taxonomy and axiology. I find the author\u27s thesis entirely persuasive: what follows is meant to serve as a guide to the overall argument and additionally to highlight various important threads that remain somewhat diffuse in a book of this scope