Frazer, with Freud, Marx, and Jung, is one of the thinkers who have had a deep and pervasive influence on modern literature. One of the great nineteenth-century syntheses, The Golden Bough was the culmination of a century of investigations into myth and ritual. John Vickery locates The Golden Bough in the context of its age and shows how, by gathering up many strands of nineteenth-century thought, it embodied the dominant intellectual tradition shaping the modern spirit.

The author's intimate acquaintance with an extraordinary range of modern literature enables him to demonstrate the variety of strategies that poets and novelists have used to assimilate The Golden Bough in their individual attitudes and preoccupations. The remaining chapters of the book are devoted to extended discussions of the intellectual, thematic, and format impact of The Golden Bough on Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence, and Joyce.

Originally published in 1973.

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