The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959-1987

by Joseph Campbell

Overview

In these pages, the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell presents twelve eclectic, far-ranging, and brilliant essays gathered together for the first time. The essays explore myth in all its dimensions: its history; its influence on art, literature, and culture; and its role in everyday life.

This second volume of Campbell’s essays (following The Flight of the Wild Gander) brings together his uncollected writings from 1959 to 1987. Written at the height of Campbell’s career—and showcasing the lively intelligence that made him the twentieth century’s premier writer on mythology—these essays investigate the profound links between myth, the individual, and societies ancient and contemporary. Covering diverse terrain ranging from psychology to the occult, from Thomas Mann to the Grateful Dead, from Goddess spirituality to Freud and Jung, these playful and erudite writings reveal the threads of myth woven deeply into the fabric of our culture and our lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608684915
Publisher:	New World Library
Publication date:	03/14/2017
Series:	The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Joseph Campbell is widely credited with bringing mythology to a mass audience. His works, including The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the four-volume The Masks of God, and The Power of Myth (with Bill Moyers), rank among the classics in mythology and literature.

Table of Contents

Mythology and History
Comparative Mythology as an Introduction to Cross-Cultural Studies
The Historical Development of Mythology
Renewal Myths and Rites
Johann Jacob Bachofen
The Mystery Number Of The Goddess

Mythology and the Arts
Creativity
The Interpretation of Symbolic Forms
Mythological Themes in Creative Literature and Art
The Occult in Myth and Literature
Erotic Irony and Mythic Forms in the Art of Thomas Mann

Appendix: Reading list for Joseph Campbell’s Class on Mythology at Sarah Lawrence College
Notes
A Joseph Campbell Bibliography
Index
About the Author
About the Joseph Campbell Foundation

Editorial Reviews

Campbell has become one of the rarest of intellectuals in American life: a serious thinker who has been embraced by the popular culture.”
— Newsweek

“No one in our century—not Freud, not Thomas Mann, not Lévi-Strauss—has so brought the mythical sense of the world and its eternal figures back into our everyday consciousness.”
— James Hillman

“In our generation the mythographer who has had the fullest command of the huge scholarly literature, the analytic ability, the lucid prose, and the needed staying power has been Joseph Campbell.”
— Commentary

“Accordingly the vision and the visionary, though apparently separate, are one; and all the heavens, all the hells, all the gods and demons, all the figures of the mythic worlds, are within us as portions of ourselves—portions, that is to say, that are of our deepest, primary nature, and thus of our share in nature. They are out there as well as in here, yet, in this field of consciousness, without separation. Our personal dreams are our personal guides, therefore, to the ranges of myth and of the gods. Dreams are our personal myths; myths, the general dream.”
— Joseph Campbell, from The Mythic Dimension

From the Publisher

Joseph Campbell was that rare hybrid, an academic with the reputation of a rock star. So there’s popular interest in an audiobook like this one, which brings together some of his previously uncollected essays. Braden Wright's reading is mostly very fine. There are themes and images to which Campbell kept returning, such as the Upanishads, The Magic Mountain, and two very large wooden statues in Nara, so listeners should expect to encounter them here more than once. Wright achieves good pronunciation in the many foreign languages that make brief appearances. His tone is authoritative but still somehow homey, like Campbell's in his TV appearances. Wright does make a few mispronunciations in English. Overlook that—as this is a fine addition to the listenable Campbell canon. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2018 - AudioFile