5/13/2023 0 Comments The power of myth pbs![]() Happily, with the arrival of the newest volume in the series, Dubravka Ugresic's Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, any serious reader's faith in Canongate's project must be-at least temporarily-restored. ![]() ![]() The results are mixed: too often the books, even those by major writers like Margaret Atwood, are polemical or affected. Canongate has busied itself for some years commissioning contemporary writers, well-established and less so, to rewrite and reshape touchstones from the mythoi of wildly divergent cultures. Such an illustrious pedigree-alongside Joyce writers from Cervantes to Flaubert to Kafka-does not, however, mean that any attempt to produce works in this vein is necessarily praiseworthy. What is the Aeneid if not a re-imagining of the Homeric epics? What is The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha if not a perverse and sophisticated re-furbishing of knightly legends Celtic, Gallic, and Iberian? That such refashionings have played an unignorable role in literary modernity is more or less beyond dispute-one need point only to the 20th century most titanic work of mythmaking, Ulysses, as evidence. ![]() The impulse to reshape the myths we inherit is as old as literary culture itself. ![]()
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