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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.
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Campbell's monomyth described a universal narrative of the myth of the hero's journey which he claimed had disappeared in contemporary culture. Lawrence and Jewett described an American evolution of this mythological structure that reflected a deep antipathy to democratic institutions through the violent actions of a hero who remains separate ...
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 ...
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:
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.
According to Marquard, the chief example of a monomyth is that of world history as progress toward emancipation. This myth emerged in the mid-18th century philosophy of history and turned "histories" into the singular "history". [19] Marquard calls it the second end of polymythical thinking; the first was the end of religious polytheism.
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 ...