Ritual, Myth, and the Modernist Text
LIBRARY OF ANTHROPOLOGY
Editors:Anthony L. LaRuffa and Joel S. Savishinsky
Section Editors
Anthropology and Language: Richard K. Blot
Anthropology and Literature: Rose DeAngelis
Anthropology and Religion: John W. Pulis
Ethnographic Studies and Theory: Anthony L. LaRuffa and Joel S. Savishinsky
Physical Anthropology and Archaeology: Louis Flam
Advisory Board: Mary Ann Castle, Robert DiBennardo,
Mary Ebihara, Philip Sicker and Lucie Saunders
SAN CIPRIANO
Life in a Puerto Rican Community
Anthony L. LaRuffa
THE TRAIL OF THE HARE
Environment and Stress in a Sub-Arctic Community
Second Edition
Joel S. Savishinsky
LANGUAGE IN AFRICA
An Introductory Survey
Edgar A. Gregersen
OUTCASTE
Jewish Life in Southern Iran
Laurence D. Loeb
DISCOVERING PAST BEHAVIOR
Experiments in the Archaeology of the American Southwest
Paul Grebinger
REVOLT AGAINST THE DEAD
The Modernization of a Mayan Community in the Highlands of Guatemala
Douglas E. Brintnall
FIELDWORK
The Human Experience
Edited by Robert Lawless, Vinson H. Sutlive, Jr., and Mario D. Zamora
DONEGALS CHANGING TRADITIONS
An Ethnographic Study
Eugenia Shanklin
MONTE CARMELO
An Italian-American Community in the Bronx
Anthony L. LaRuffa
MASTERS OF ANIMALS
Oral Traditions of the Tolupan Indians, Honduras
Anne Chapman
CRISIS AND COMMITMENT
The Life History of a French Social Movement
Alexander Alland, Jr., with Sonia Alland
RITUAL, MYTH, AND THE MODERNIST TEXT
The Influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf
Martha C. Carpentier
This book is part of a series. The publisher will accept continuation orders which may be cancelled at any time and which provide for automatic billing and shipping of each title in the series upon publication. Please write for details.
Ritual, Myth, and the Modernist Text
The Influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf
Martha C. Carpentier
Seton Hall University
South Orange, New Jersey, USA
First published 1998 by Gordon and Breach Publishers
Published 2013 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY, 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright 1998 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V Published by license under the Gordon and Breach Publishers imprint.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Opening chapter illustrations and selected excerpts printed with permission of Cambridge University Press, New York.
Chapter 1 epigraph originally appeared in Ancient Art and Ritual, Jane Ellen Harrison, Greenwood Press: Westport, Connecticut, 1969.
Copyright 1951 Oxford University Press: United Kingdom. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.
Cover art by Ralph Carpentier.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Carpentier, Martha C.
Ritual, myth, and the modernist text : the influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf. (The library of anthropology. Anthropology and literature ; v. 12 ISSN 0141-1012)
1. Harrison, Jane Ellen, 18501928 Influence 2. Mythology in literature
I. Title
ISBN 13: 978-9-057-00517-6 (hbk)
For Dennis Burns
Contents
Introduction to the Series
The Library of Anthropology now encompasses both a classical orientation and current directions in the field. It seeks to promote an awareness of new developments and changing orientations, while continuing to stress its long-term interest in traditional anthropological fields.
The section Physical Anthropology and Archaeology continues to address the substantive and theoretical issues of biological and cultural evolution. Ethnographic Studies and Theory remains a major focus. The range of interest is global in terms of contemporary cultures and ethnic populations, and ethnohistorical in terms of past cultures and societies. Three new sections augment the more traditional four-fields approach to anthropology.
Volumes in the section Anthropology and Language address issues in linguistic anthropology broadly conceived: studies of the communicative means people use to accomplish social endsfrom political oratory to storytelling, from joking to sermonizing, and from gossiping to testifying. Anthropological studies that explore the interrelation of language and political economy are especially encouraged.
Works in Anthropology and Literature examine and attempt to define the areas in which these two disciplines come together and blend the personal, poetic and scientific. Cultural or ethnic studies, literature as ethnography, literary theory in anthropological studies, and anthropological theory in cultural (ethnic) studies are topics for consideration.
Volumes in Anthropology and Religion explore the practice of religion and attendant notions of ritual, identity and world view from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives in a number of settings and contexts.
Anthony L. LaRuffa
Joel S. Savishinsky
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Philip Sicker for his encouragement and guidance from the beginning and Rose DeAngelis for the opportunity to complete this project.
I would also like to thank my mother Sallie Blake for invaluable indexing and copy editing expertise; my father Ralph Carpentier for the cover art; and my husband Donald Sherblom for his unstinting support of me and my work.
In 1923 two important essays appeared, charting the immense changes taking place in fiction: T.S. Eliots review Ulysses, Order and Myth, and Virginia Woolfs Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. What were some of these changes? Eliot and Woolf agree that literature must grow out of the writers direct, concrete, emotional experience of life, not out of an abstract, conceptual or moral construct imposed on life. In this sense they both saw their generation, the Georgian to use Woolfs nomenclature, as radically opposed to the past, specifically to Victorian and Edwardian attitudes and literary conventions.
Eliot posed himself against Richard Aldington: both were agreed as to what we want in principle, and agreed to call it classicism, but they disagreed as to how classicism should be achieved and as to what contemporary writing exhibits a tendency in that direction. Eliot then defined a contrast, crucial in its ramifications, between the old orientation toward classicism in literature and the new:
One can be classical, in a sense, by turning away from nineteenths of the material which lies at hand and selecting only mummified stuff from a museum. Or one can be classical in tendency by doing the best one can with the material at hand. And in this material I include the emotions and feelings of the writer himself, which, for that writer, are simply material which he must accept not virtues to be enlarged or vices to be diminished.
