Abstract
During the heyday of twentieth-century mythic thinking, the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch observed, “The mythical is not something ‘extra’; we live in myth and symbol all the time.”1 To live in modern Britain was to be surrounded by myth. The British path to modernity was winding, uncertain, and took travelers into unmarked territory. The modern problem was perforce to tread this path into the unknown, as well-worn structures of meaning were left behind. Along this path the British people constructed fencerows, planted hedges, established way stations, and erected signposts in the form of myth. These eased the journey and gave it meaning. This study has sought to illuminate some of those attempts to make meaning through myth.
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Notes
Iris Murdoch, “Mass, Might and Myth,” Spectator, 7 September 1962, 338.
Michael Saler, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: “Medieval Modernism” and the London Underground ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1999 )
Scott Anthony, Public Relations and the Making of Modern Britain: Stephen Tallents and the Birth of a Progressive Media Profession ( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012 ).
Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffragette Campaign, 1870– 1914 ( London: Chatto and Windus, 1987 ), 125–26.
As documented in Oliver Green, Underground Art: London Transport Poster 1908- Present ( London: Studio Vista, 1990 ).
Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 60. See also idem, A Secular Age ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007 ).
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© 2013 Matthew Sterenberg
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Sterenberg, M. (2013). Epilogue. In: Mythic Thinking in Twentieth-Century Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137354976_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137354976_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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