neomythology

English

Alternative forms

• neo-mythology

Etymology

From neo- +‎ mythology.

Noun

neomythology (countable and uncountable, plural neomythologies)

1. New mythology.
   • 1988, Lawrence E[ugene] Sullivan, Icanchu’s Drum: An Orientation to Meaning in South American Religions, New York, N.Y.: Macmillan Publishing Company; London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, →ISBN, page 440:

     There exist contemporary aremi sung in Spanish and based on a Christianized “neomythology” of Dioso, a god miraculously conceived in the womb of a girl by the snake master of the water domain.

   • 1993, John D[avid] Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger, Bloomington, Ind., Indianapolis, Ind.: Indiana University Press, →ISBN, pages 169–170:

     Heidegger’s Denkweg traces a path from demythologizing the mythic world of the scriptures to remythologizing the world in the accents of a Greek neomythology.

   • 1995, Claude J. Summers, editor, The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader’s Companion to the Writers and Their Works, from Antiquity to the Present, New York, N.Y.: Henry Holt and Company, →ISBN, page 340:

     In her poetry, Grahn continued this project of creating a “neomythology” in The Queen of Wands (1982) and The Queen of Swords (1987), the first two volumes of what Grahn envisions as a four-part series corresponding to the four suits of the Tarot.

   • 1995, Iaroslava Boubnova, “No One Has Ever Seen God”, in Beyond Belief: Contemporary Art from East Central Europe, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, →ISBN, page 55:

     Today the ontogenesis of the Christian myth as a phenomenon of culture is impossible outside of the creation of neomythology as one of the ways to either break out of or acknowledge the power of faith. The creation of neomythology “feeds on” religion but as a world outlook and a form-giving force.

   • 1997, Donald M. Friedman, “The Lady in the Garden: On the Literary Genetics of Milton’s Eve”, in Albert C. Labriola, editor, Milton Studies XXXV, University of Pittsburgh Press, →ISBN, page 127:

     He also exploits what in other poems of the kind would have been a disadvantage—the presexual blankness of Mary’s femaleness—by the neomythology of explaining Mary’s shaping power over the natural scene of Nunappleton as a product of her devotion to “higher beauties,” those particularly of wisdom and the command of language.

   • 1997, Robin M. Chandler, “The New Movement of the Center: A Theoretical Model for Future Analysis in Art Worlds”, in Pheobe Farris-Dufrene, editor, Voices of Color: Art and Society in the Americas, Humanities Press, →ISBN, page 41:

     As intellectuals read the written text, compile ethnographies, tour the non-Western terrain, and make art out of the charred remnants of these quests, we always run the risk of fortifying the old culture with neomythologies that continue to invade the private space of others.

   • 1999, “Latin American Women Artists”, in Phoebe Farris, editor, Women Artists of Color: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook to 20th Century Artists in the Americas, Greenwood Press, →ISBN, page 182:

     It evokes the journey of the life-struggle via collective symbols and neomythology to connect the individual soul to the soul of the universe.

   • 2002, Amy Turner Bushnell, “Gates, Patterns, and Peripheries: The Field of Frontier Latin America”, in Christine Daniels, Michael V. Kennedy, editors, Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820, New York, N.Y., London: Routledge, →ISBN, pages 16–17:

     The history of the Americas was reduced to a neomythology of the good and evil twins, pairing an essentialized victim and victor, conquered and conqueror, American Indian and European/Eurocreole in a symbiotic relationship, like a doll with a reversible skirt and two heads.

   • 2009, Caitlín R[ebekah] Kiernan, A is for Alien, Subterranean Press, →ISBN, page 150:

     “Jane Doe” was Judith Louise Darger, born 1992, Ph. D. in Anthropology from Yale, specialized in urban neomythology, syncretism, etc. & did a book with HarperC back in ’21—Bloody Mary, La Llorona, and the Blue Lady: Feminine Icons in a Fabricated Child’s Apocalypse.

   • 2012, Marcus Cheng Chye Tan, Acoustic Interculturalism: Listening to Performance, Palgrave Macmillan, →ISBN, pages 210–211:

     In this present-absence of cultural origin and ‘primal’ reference, interculturalism can certainly be regarded as a schismogenetic third space of neither nothing nor being; its presence as performance predicated on a neomythology of authenticity, origin, tradition and roots. This neomythology is conversely a product of global entertainment and market forces that in turn reimagine cultural identities which inevitably feed the quest for universals and ‘deep structures’.

Related terms

• neomythological