Ritual, Myth and the Modernist Text

The predominance of Hellenic maternal archetypes in the writings of James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, may be traced back to anthropologist Jane Harrison. This text discusses Harrison's influence over the literary modernist movement (late-19th and early-20th centuries).

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First Published in 1998. Volume 12 in the Library of Anthropology series. This text traces the influence of Jane Ellen Harrison, a brilliant classicist and one of the 'Cambridge Anthropologists' on Jams Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Decade of critical over-emphasis on Sir James Frazer's influence on modernism have obscured the more important contributions of Harrison, who explored the chthonic Greek matriarchal cults prior to patriarchal Olympianism and originated the 'ritual theory', finding the origins of Greek drama- and ultimately of all art, in religious ritual. Harrison's images of matriarchal divinity and the feminist principles they embodied inspired these modernist writers to envision the young artist reborn as creator through symbolic union with the semiotic body.