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In 1927, as a twenty-three-year-old postgraduate scholar in Paris, Joseph Campbell first encountered James Joyce’s Ulysses. Known for being praised and for kicking up controversy (including an obscenity trial in the United States in 1920), the novel left Campbell both intrigued and confused, as it had many others. Because he was in Paris, he was able to visit the Shakespeare & Company bookstore—the outpost of the original publisher of Ulysses, Sylvia Beach. She gave him “clues” for reading Ulysses, and that, Campbell attested, changed his career. For the next sixty years, Campbell moved through the labyrinths of Joyce’s creations—writing and lecturing on Joyce using depth psychology, comparative religion, anthropology, and art history as tools of analysis. Arranged by Joyce scholar Edmund L. Epstein, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words presents a wide range of Campbell’s writing and lectures on Joyce, which together form an illuminating running commentary on Joyce’s masterworks. Campbell’s visceral appreciation for all that was new in Joyce will delight the previously uninitiated, and perhaps intimidated, as well as longtime lovers of both Joyce and Campbell.
Price: $23.95
Pages: 368
Publisher: New World Library
Imprint: New World Library
Publication Date:
21 July 2026
Trim Size: 8.50 X 5.50 in
ISBN: 9781955831789
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Folklore & Mythology, Folklore studies / Study of myth
Praise for Mythic Worlds, Modern Words:
“Along with his famous studies of heroes, Jung, global myths, and world religions, Joseph Campbell was also an early and important James Joyce scholar, best known for A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, coauthored with Henry M. Robinson. [Mythic Worlds, Modern Words] gathers Campbell’s lectures and shorter essays on Joyce’s work, opening with an obituary notice about the writer and ending with a controversial account of Thornton Wilder’s play The Skin of Our Teeth (which Campbell believed was little more than a Wake rip-off). In between Campbell proffers his interpretations of the major works, emphasizing their use of archetypal figures and situations.”
— Washington Post Book World
Praise for Joseph Campbell:
“Campbell has become one of the rarest of intellectuals in American life: a serious thinker who has been embraced by the popular culture.”
— Newsweek
“In our generation the mythographer who has had the fullest command of the huge scholarly literature, the analytic ability, the lucid prose, and the needed staying power has been Joseph Campbell.”
— Commentary
“Along with his famous studies of heroes, Jung, global myths, and world religions, Joseph Campbell was also an early and important James Joyce scholar, best known for A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, coauthored with Henry M. Robinson. [Mythic Worlds, Modern Words] gathers Campbell’s lectures and shorter essays on Joyce’s work, opening with an obituary notice about the writer and ending with a controversial account of Thornton Wilder’s play The Skin of Our Teeth (which Campbell believed was little more than a Wake rip-off). In between Campbell proffers his interpretations of the major works, emphasizing their use of archetypal figures and situations.”
— Washington Post Book World
Praise for Joseph Campbell:
“Campbell has become one of the rarest of intellectuals in American life: a serious thinker who has been embraced by the popular culture.”
— Newsweek
“In our generation the mythographer who has had the fullest command of the huge scholarly literature, the analytic ability, the lucid prose, and the needed staying power has been Joseph Campbell.”
— Commentary
Joseph Campbell is widely credited with bringing mythology to a mass audience. His works, including The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the four-volume The Masks of God, and The Power of Myth (with Bill Moyers), rank among the classics in mythology and literature.