This book traces the influences of the Gernet School on Vernant of Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes and on Detienne, Vidal-Naquet, and Loraux of Vernant and Levi-Strauss. It also considers the influence on Vernant and in turn on the others of the pre-structuralists Gernet and Ignace Meyerson.

The Gernet Centre was founded as a place where the structural method could be applied to the classics. 'Structuralists' attribute the survival, origin and function of myths to common crosscultural factors they identify as 'structures'. As this book, first published as The Structuralists on Myth in 1992 explains, these structures are bundles of information not obvious either to the narrator or to the listener. The bundles are collected features that reveal either the reasons for the survival of myths, or their origins, or their functions within their contexts. The structuralists consider themselves to have talents as the collectors from myths of these bundles of information.