Myth and the Human Sciences ─ Hans Blumenberg's Theory of Myth

This is the first book in English devoted to the theory of myth outlined by the twentieth-century German philosopher Hans Blumenberg. Blumenberg can be regarded as the most important German theorist of myth of the second half of the twentieth-century. Blumenberg’s work, and especially his Work on Myth (1979), has resonated internationally across academic disciplines ranging from literary theory, via philosophy, religious studies and anthropology, to the history and philosophy of science. Yet little literature in English devoted to Blumenberg exists.

This book introduces the reader to Blumenberg’s Work on Myth, as well as to its broader intellectual background and its relationship to other eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories of myth. According to Blumenberg, myth constitutes the human attempt to rationalize and control anxieties concerning the indeterminate and uncontrollable forces of nature by anthropomorphizing these forces into distinct and mythic objects. This volume critically analyzes and contextualizes Blumenberg’s arguments concerning myth in such a way as to highlight their continuing relevance for a number of academic disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology, literary studies, and religious studies. The book also offers a more digestible and approachable way into the thinker’s often complex and arcane processes of argumentation, thereby functioning as a key secondary resource for teachers who wish to introduce Blumenberg into the classroom.

Angus Nicholls is Senior Lecturer in German and Comparative Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. He is author of Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic (2006) and the co-editor of Thinking the Unconscious: Nineteenth Century German Thought (2009) and In the Embrace of the Swan: Anglo-German Mythologies in Literature, the Visual Arts, and Cultural Theory (2009).