Prize to Research Works on Myth Criticism 2022

Asteria’s Management Board has granted the Prize to Research Works on Myth Criticism of 2022 to two research works: the book Wasteland Modernism: The Disenchantment of Myth by Rebeca Gualberto and the article ” ‘At Least I Have the Flowers of Myself’: Revisionist Myth-Making in H.D.’s Eurydice” by Cristina Salcedo.

Next, you can find the abstracts and links of the two research works:

Wasteland Modernism: The Disenchantment of Myth – Rebeca Gualberto

This book proposes a renewed myth-critical approach to the so-called ‘wasteland modernism’ of the 1920s to reassess certain key texts of the American modernist canon from a critical prism that offers new perspectives of analysis and interpretation. Myth-criticism and, more specifically, the critical survey of myth as an aesthetic and ideological strategy fundamental for the comprehension of modernist literature, leads to an engaging discussion about the disenchantment of myth in modernist literary texts. This process of mythical disenchantment, inextricable from the cultural and historical circumstances that define the modernist zeitgeist, offers a possibility for revising from a contemporary standpoint a set of classic texts that are crucial to our understanding of the modern literary tradition in the United States. This study carries out an exhaustive and updated myth-critical examination of works by T.S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and Djuna Barnes to broaden the scope of familiar themes and archetypes, enclosing the textual analysis of these works in a wider exploration about the purpose and functioning of myth in literature, particularly in times of crisis and transformation.

“At Least I Have the Flowers of Myself”: Revisionist Myth-Making in H.D.’s Eurydice – Cristina Salcedo

Taking its cue from the rediscovery of H.D.’s works initiated in the 1980s, this article aims to advance the efforts destined to recover the modernist poet’s revisionist legacy and, in particular, her revisionary myth-making. To this end, adopting a myth-criticism interpretative approach, I will analyse one of the most relevant examples of H.D.’s work in this respect: her lyric poem “Eurydice” (1925). In particular, I will examine H.D.’s ‘tactics of revisionary mythopoesis’, that is, narrative strategies which distance her poem from the dominant account of the myth and that enable the poet to contest the established classical tradition. The examination will ultimately bring to the surface H.D.’s invaluable contribution to the re-shaping and re-writing of myth from a female perspective and the way in which she created a different, subverted, version of the classical account.