Mythic Thinking in Twentieth-Century Britain is the first cultural and intellectual history of myth as a mode of thought in modern Britain. Focusing on the period 1900-1980, it examines how a variety of thinkers and cultural groups used the concept of myth to articulate their anxieties about modernity and seek meaning within it. Mythic thinking was thus a profoundly modern response to what W.H. Auden called 'the modern problem' - the erosion of traditional meaning-creating structures and institutions. This book tells the story of mythic thinking in Britain from its origins in late-Victorian social anthropology to its cultural mainstreaming in the postwar period. It is a story that reveals the persistence of yearning for transcendent meaning in age that has often been assumed by historians to be 'disenchanted' and thoroughly secularized.

A variety of thinkers used the concept of myth to articulate their anxieties about modernity. By telling the story of mythic thinking in Britain from its origins in Victorian social anthropology to its postwar cultural mainstreaming, this book reveals a yearning for transcendence in an age long assumed to be disenchanted.