Myth and Victorian Literature

Myth is a prominent part of the Victorian engagement with the past and the present, and myths were essential to the Victorians’ conception of themselves. Before the eighteenth century, myth usually refers to the inherited stories of the Greeks and Romans, but, with expanded exploration through travel and scholarship, this gradually widened to include mythologies belonging to other cultures. The Romantic legacy looms large in the considerations of the early-Victorian inheritance of classical myths. Discussion of myth in this period is often connected to questions of cultural progress, and the classical competes with the gothic for aesthetic preeminence. The 1830s, the early Victorian period, sees the beginning of the Arthurian revival. The mid-Victorians are preoccupied with the moral safety of Hellenistic subject matter and by its wider cultural significance, a preoccupation that continues through to the end of the century. Classical myth in the fin de siècle has an important homoerotic element throughout the nineteenth century, and it achieves this in its fullest form in the work of aesthetes and decadents. It is difficult to limit the boundaries of the study of myth and literature for a number of reasons: the slipperiness of “myth” as a concept; the vast array of cultures from which myths are taken and reworked in literature; the interpretive problem of establishing the nature of echoes of mythological narratives and mythological characters; ambiguities in the genres associated with the wealth of anthropological material that contributes to the scholarly study of myth; and the degree to which myth should be associated with belief. Mythography, or the study of myth, is an interdisciplinary field that transverses folklore, theology, classics, literature, anthropology, and history. In addition to collecting and retelling stories from cultures worldwide, Victorian writers also explored the mentality of mythmaking, the variants of myths, and the social function of myth.