Mythology in literature

Sheri S. Tepper, using postmodern literary techniques, utilizes ancient story forms to examine our contemporary world in three science fiction novels. Classical Greek mythology in the form of a parodic drama, "Iphigenia at Ilium" is intricately woven into The Gate to Women's Country. European fairy tale characters become metaphors for a postmodern world threatened by overpopulation and the loss of magic in Beauty. An American Indian fable, featuring Coyote, provides the mythic paradigm for A Plague of Angels. Each ancient story form is re-worked into Tepper's postmodernist fiction giving a new slant to familiar stories that highlight Tepper's feminist, ecological themes: of the folly of war, the threat of overpopulation, and mankind's interconnectedness to all living creatures.

Thomas Kinsella creates his own private mythology to explain
those features of life which continually bewilder man. The
central myth in Kinsella's poetry involves the isolated hero
figu.re and his quest for order in a chaotic world. The quest
exists perpetually, but glimpses of order appear after each
ordeal encountered and through subjection to and acceptance
of the brutal, bitter life offered by the chaos. He derives
the basic pattern for his myth from the cyclical processes
evident in nature and in earlier myths. The seasonal, solar,
and organic cycles of nature correspond to the appearance and
themes of Kinsella's works. Kinsella's style reflects his
quest. It is ordered and carefully structured. Structure
and syntax work together to support and reinforce the
thoughts and meanings within each poem and throughout the
cycle of his myth.

C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy presents a hero in the person of philologist Dr. Elwin Ransom. Lewis's presentation exhibits a purposeful and precise use of language that describes experience and characterizes emotional authenticity. This use of language becomes particularly interesting when examined in light of the theories of Owen Barfield, who along with Lewis recognizes that myth is significant as an expression of language and its relation to the human condition, and Joseph Campbell, who discusses the journey of the hero. In his own writings Lewis contends that there has been a process of working against the "mythical imagination," moving the hero away from the concrete and toward the abstract. Lewis works to reverse this process by presenting a modern hero who demonstrates an awareness of "old" conventions of language, emotion, and expression in which archaic and mythic concepts are available, where understanding need not be abstract to be acceptable.