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Illustration of the hero's journey. In narratology and comparative mythology, the hero's quest or hero's journey, also known as the monomyth, is the common template of stories that involve a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed.
Joseph John Campbell (March 26, 1904 – October 30, 1987) was an American writer. He was a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College who worked in comparative mythology and comparative religion.
The first part of the book describes eight major character archetypes in detail. [7] Those are: Hero: someone who is willing to sacrifice his own needs on behalf of others; Mentor: all the characters who teach and protect heroes and give them gifts; Threshold Guardian: a menacing face to the hero, but if understood, they can be overcome
[1] A classic structure of narrative thread often used in both fiction and non-fiction writing is the monomyth, or hero's journey, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. First, typically the harmony of daily life is broken by a particularly dramatic event that leads into the main story.
The similarities of these myths brought Campbell to write his book in which he details the structure of the monomyth. He calls the motif of the archetypal narrative, "the hero's adventure". In a well-known passage from the introduction to The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell summarizes the monomyth:
The major contribution of The American Monomyth is a re-thinking of Joseph Campbell's famous classical monomyth from his 1949 book The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Campbell's monomyth described a universal narrative of the myth of the hero's journey which he claimed had disappeared in contemporary culture.
The four heroes from the 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West. In narratology and comparative mythology, the Rank–Raglan mythotype (sometimes called the hero archetypes) is a set of narrative patterns proposed by psychoanalyst Otto Rank and later on amateur anthropologist Lord Raglan that lists different cross-cultural traits often found in the accounts of heroes, including ...
In contrast, Jewett and Lawrence define the American monomyth as: A community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil; normal institutions fail to contend with this threat; a selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task; aided by fate, his decisive victory restores the community to its paradisiacal ...