The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959-1987

(Paperback)

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These 12 eclectic essays explore myth and its fascinating context in the human imagination - in the arts, literature, and culture, as well as in everyday life. The most recent title in New World Library's Collected Works of Joseph Campbell 11-volume series, this new paperback edition features pieces that exhibit Campbell's trademark thoughtfulness and intelligence. These essays explore the topic for which Campbell was best known: the many connections between myth and history, psychology, and the daily world. Drawing from such varied sources as Thomas Mann, the occult, Jungian and Freudian theory, and the Grateful Dead, these dynamic writings elucidate the many ways in which myth touches our lives, our psyches, and our relationship to the world.

Reviews

"Campbell has become one of the rarest of intellectuals in American life: a serious thinker who has been embraced by the popular culture."
-- Newsweek

"No one in our century--not Freud, not Thomas Mann, not Lvi-Strauss--has so brought the mythical sense of the world and its eternal figures back into our everyday consciousness."
-- James Hillman

"In our generation the mythographer who has had the fullest command of the huge scholarly literature, the analytic ability, the lucid prose, and the needed staying power has been Joseph Campbell."
-- Commentary

"Accordingly the vision and the visionary, though apparently separate, are one; and all the heavens, all the hells, all the gods and demons, all the figures of the mythic worlds, are within us as portions of ourselves--portions, that is to say, that are of our deepest, primary nature, and thus of our share in nature. They are out there as well as in here, yet, in this field of consciousness, without separation. Our personal dreams are our personal guides, therefore, to the ranges of myth and of the gods. Dreams are our personal myths; myths, the general dream."
-- Joseph Campbell, from The Mythic Dimension

Author Bio

Joseph Campbell is widely credited with bringing mythology to a mass audience. His works, including The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the four-volume The Masks of God, and The Power of Myth (with Bill Moyers), rank among the classics in mythology and literature.