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Myth is a genre of folklore consisting primarily of narratives that play a fundamental role in a society. For scholars, this is very different from the vernacular ...
Comparative mythology is the comparison of myths from different cultures in an attempt to identify shared themes and characteristics. [1] Comparative mythology has served a variety of academic purposes.
A creation myth or cosmogonic myth is a type of cosmogony, [2] a symbolic narrative of how the world began and how people first came to inhabit it. [3] [4] [5] While in popular usage the term myth often refers to false or fanciful stories, members of cultures often ascribe varying degrees of truth to their creation myths.
This period of time became romanticized and idealized in literature and art to form a myth. Richard Slotkin , a prominent scholar on the subject, defines the myth of the frontier as "America as a wide-open land of unlimited opportunity for the strong, ambitious, self-reliant individual to thrust his way to the top."
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 ...
the term "myth" as used here does not mean "false" or "fiction". Even in my old and yellowed Webster's, "fiction" is the third meaning of the word. In its primary and more technical meaning "myth" refers to a story or group of stories that serve to explain how a particular society views their world.
[n 4] [n 5] According to Howard Schwartz, "the myth of the fall of Lucifer" existed in fragmentary form in Isaiah 14:12 and other ancient Jewish literature; Schwartz claims that the myth originated from "the ancient Canaanite myth of Athtar, who attempted to rule the throne of Ba'al, but was forced to descend and rule the underworld instead". [133]
Within academic circles, the term myth is often used specifically to refer to origin and cosmogonic myths. Folklorists, for example, reserve the term myth for stories that describe creation. Stories that do not primarily focus on origins are categorized as legend or folk tale, which are distinct from myths according to folklorists. [5]