can

appear loose. Trade unions are then accused of being monopolies, controlling the terms
and conditions of the selling of labour. But the range has been historically wide. The mC16
example from Utopia could be quite reasonably applied to the conditions that socialists now
call capitalist monopoly.

See CAPITALISM

MYTH

Myth came into English as late as eC19, though it was somewhat preceded by the form mythos
(C18) from fw mythos, 1L, mythos, Gk – a fable or story or tale, later contrasted with logos
and historia to give the sense of ‘what could not really exist or have happened’. Myth and
mythos were widely preceded in English by mythology (from C15) and the derived words
(from eC17) mythological, mythologize, mythologist, mythologian. These all had to do with
‘fabulous narration’ (1609) but mythology and mythologizing were most often used with a
sense of interpreting or annotating the fabulous tales. We have mythological interpretation
from 1614, and there is a title of Sandys in 1632: Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished,
Mythologiz’d, and Represented in Figures, with the same sense.
Two tendencies can be seen in the word in eC19. Coleridge used mythos in a sense which
has become common: a particular imaginative construction (plot in the most extending sense).
Meanwhile the rationalist Westminster Review, in perhaps the first use of the word, wrote in
1830 of ‘the origin of myths’ and of seeking their ‘cause in the circumstances of fabulous
history’.
Each of these references was retrospective, and myth alternated with fable, being
distinguished from legend which, though perhaps unreliable, was related to history and from
allegory which might be fabulous but which indicated some reality. However, from mC19, the
short use of myth to mean not only a fabulous but an untrustworthy or even deliberately
Copyright © 1985. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

deceptive invention became common, and has widely persisted.

On the other hand, myth acquired in an alternative tradition a new and positive sense, in a
new context. Before C19 myths had either been dismissed as mere fables (often as pagan or
heathen fables), or treated as allegories or confused memories of origins and pre-history. But
several new intellectual approaches were now defined. Myths were related to a ‘disease of
language’ (Muller) in which a confusion of names led to personifications; to an animistic stage
of human culture (Lang); and to specific rituals, which the myths gave access to (Frazer,
Harrison; the popular association of ‘myth and ritual’ dates from this 1C19 and eC20 work).
With the development of anthropology, both this last sense, of accounts of rituals, and a
different sense, in which myth, as an account of origins, was an active form of social
organization, were strongly developed. From each version (which in varying forms have
continued to contend with each other as well as with efforts to RATIONALIZE (q.v.) myths in such
a way as to discredit them or to reveal their true (other) causes or origins) a body of positive
popular usage has developed. Myth has been held to be a truer (deeper) version of reality than
Williams, Raymond. Keywords : A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 1985. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cunygc/detail.action?docID=679632.
Created from cunygc on 2020-08-06 13:05:01.
 (secular) history or realistic description or scientific explanation. This view ranges from
simple irrationalism and (often post-Christian) supernaturalism to more sophisticated accounts
in which myths are held to be fundamental expressions of certain properties of the human mind,
and even of basic mental or psychological human organization. These expressions are
‘timeless’ (permanent) or fundamental to particular periods or cultures. Related attempts have
been made to assimilate this mythic function to the more general CREATIVE (q.v.) functions of
art and literature, or in one school, to assimilate art and literature to this view of myth. The
resulting internal and external controversies are exceptionally intricate, and myth is now both
a very significant and a very difficult word. Coming into the language only in the last hundred
and fifty years, in a period of the disintegration of orthodox religion, it has been used
negatively as a contrast to fact, HISTORY (q.v.) and SCIENCE (q.v.); has become involved with
the difficult modern senses of imagination, creative and fiction; and has been used both to
illustrate and to analyse ‘human nature’ in a distinctively post-Christian sense (though the mode
of various schools using myth in this sense has been assimilated to Christian restatement and
apology). Meanwhile, outside this range of ideas, it has the flat common sense of a false (often
deliberately false) belief or account.

See CREATIVE, FICTION, HISTORY, IMAGE, RATIONAL

Copyright © 1985. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Williams, Raymond. Keywords : A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 1985. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cunygc/detail.action?docID=679632.
Created from cunygc on 2020-08-06 13:05:01.