Authors are not only taking up mythology and visualizing it the way they want to, but also interpreting it to tell beautiful stories and look at mythology from different perspectives. An explicit attempt to retell the purana in novel form is Anita Nair’s ‘Magical Indian Myths’ which will be analysed in the following. The novel allows insight into the complex construction of mythology; It focuses on the mystery of Indian mythology unwrapped for the universal. Answers some if not all mythological questions Anita Nair’s ‘Magical Indian Myths’ is a collection of ancient India’s myths and legends belonging to Indian culture which answers the questions about Indian mythology. India has the greatest living oral narrative tradition
Mahabharata is many times compared with Indian literature as well as Greek and other literatures. Mahabharata is compared to the great war of Trojans. Both are the epics of a civilization. Both The Mahabharata and The Iliad are about wars that started mainly because of kings or princes and their flawed characters. In The Iliad, the Trojan War began because Paris, a prince of Troy, stole King Menelaus’ wife, Helen.
Magical realism has become a popular narrative mode because it offers to the writer wishing to write against totalitarian regimes a means to attack the definitions and assumptions which support such systems by attacking the stability of the definitions upon which these systems rely. It is typical for books and essays on magical realism to begin by stating that the concept and its history are too complex to be able to provide a definition. Vonnegut’s Billy Piligrim in Slaughterhouse-Five represent a curiously American pragmatic expression of magical realism, a fatalist sense that its presence is part of the weight and inevitability of destiny. Perhaps in this way Vonnegut’s work
One strange thing about mythology and the various stories surrounding it is that none of the mythology stories and anecdotes that we hear of are verified but these are accepted culturally and in only in rare cases, will they be accepted worldwide. Being the diverse country that India is, the various cultures and religions originate from some or the other mythological story or incident. Indian mythology is a combination of various religions and sub-groups such as Vedic mythology, Hindu mythology, Buddhist mythology
Catch-22 is an analogy of the ancient poem: The Gilgamesh Epic. Heller’s uses a transcendent framework to portray the individuation of a modern hero through his struggles with the mythic and archetypal forces of irrationalism as they are manifested in civilization (Woodson, 2001:3) In literature, writers occasionally refer to novels and poems of previous writers for inspiration. In the novel Catch 22 written by Joseph Heller, Heller uses the epic of Gilgamesh as a base for his novel. As proof, the similarities and differences in the plot, characters and themes will be discussed. Firstly, the archetypal plot of the two novels will be identified and discussed as well as the effect of using an archetypes in literature.
The concept of the Hero’s journey is arguable a popular storyline for many stories ranging from Epic of Gilgamesh to modern day Harry Potter and is frequently seen in other literature and media illustrating that the concept of hero and a hero’s journey is not a new one however is still very prominent today. According the Campbell, "The first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside, and there to clarify the difficulties, eradicate them in his own case”. While Gilgamesh does not have the proper morals to be a hero, his story does follow the hero’s journey and is still being told because the values are still relatable and compelling
However, the different heroes in Byron’s tales are not interchangeable; they may possess many of the qualities Thorslev attributes, but they are not limited to them. Thorslev also rejects the influence of Byron’s personal life and experiences on the formation of the Byronic hero, believing that ‘Byron did not project life into literature nearly as much as he projected literature into life’ (Thorslev 12). However, even though Byron was certainly influenced by the literature of the time, his personal experiences had a lot to do with the iconic persona he developed. J.D Jump exposes the uncertainties in Thorslev’s generalized description of the Byronic hero. The very phrase the Byronic hero implies that there exists a single character-type to which it can refer.
The battle between Good and Evil has been an ongoing game ever since. Just like fairy tales, which are crucial pieces of literature that have a deep impact on our society. There is only a fine line between what is Good and what is Evil, there is an impossibility of Good existing in a world where Evil is absent. The boundaries between the traditional meanings of those two were rather clear and relevant when Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm wrote down their collected stories in the nineteenth century. But as of today, the evil myth and the borders between reality and fiction as well as history, literature and philosophy are blurred, and so are the roles of Good and Evil.
CHAPTER II Archetypal criticism The roots of archetypal criticism Archetypal criticism is a type of literary criticism that focuses on particular narrative patterns, archetypes, motifs, themes or characters that recur in a particular literary work or in literature in general. Archetypal criticism has its basis in the application of concepts developed in psychoanalysis and in mythology to the study of literature. The main tendency of this approach to criticism resembles to the early conception of form in Western thought. Collective unconscious lays beneath the personal conscious and personal unconscious. As Jung said, the collective unconscious is ‘‘a storehouse of knowledge, experiences, and images of the human race.
Life, war, death, and love are the main themes that touch the human soul and very often in literature, especially in masterpieces, we find them combined. Such kaleidoscopic pieces of literature, although fictional, empower ourselves to see life with different eyes and they plant in our brains the seeds of new attitudes and perspectives on life itself. In many cultures, mythologies and writings, death, far from being only an aspect or stage of life, is also a very important symbol. Death is illustrated different from a civilisation to another and from an author to another. Many of the religions of the world are actually based on the fascination of the humankind upon this subject.