Inside of every modern, ostensibly scientific, historian is an imaginative mythmaker struggling to get out, as Carl Becker insisted in his 1931 presidential address to the American Historical Association: “We are thus of that ancient and honorable company of wise men of the tribe . . . to whom in successive ages has been intrusted the keeping of the useful myths.” Becker was not alone; William H. McNeill made a related argument in “Mythistory,” his 1985 presidential address to the AHA, as did William Cronon in his 2013 presidential address, “Storytelling.” Modern historians were not the only ones to embrace myth, as Matthew Sterenberg reveals in this important study. Myths played a prominent role throughout twentieth-century Western culture, often providing symbolic meaning and transcendence in an age usually identified as rational and secular.

Sterenberg focuses on how “mythic thinking” (2) permeated British thought roughly between 1900 and 1980. He focuses primarily on literature, but he also discusses the uses of myth by anthropologists, psychologists, literary critics, and theologians. He finds that there was a “family resemblance” (13) to how myths were used by British intellectuals to imbue modernity with meaning. His work will be illuminating to historians of modern Britain, as well as to anyone interested in understanding the “complementary” nature of Western modernity. He joins other recent critics of the idea that modernity is inherently disenchanted: it did not simply oppose reason and the imagination, secularism and spiritualism, or myth and truth, but rather held them, and other antinomies, together in a tense yet productive equipoise.

As Sterenberg notes, there were numerous definitions of myth in the twentieth century, and he sensibly focuses on the concepts advanced by his subjects. These individuals shared a broad understanding of myth as “an explanatory narrative of perennial relevance that deals with ultimate questions” (6). Most maintained that myth captured metaphysical truths accessible to the imagination, rather than to reason; because myths' symbolic meanings were not empirical, they did not contradict the findings of modern science. Mythic thinking thereby restored meaning to a secular and scientific world without rejecting modernity, in contrast to the more nostalgic responses to the modern condition in Britain represented by the humanism of F. R. Leavis, the conservative embrace of the past, or the turn to religion.

Sterenberg acknowledges that his focus on the metaphysical understanding of myth represents but one strand of a complex tapestry involving the sacrifice of some aspects of myth that have been covered by other scholars (such as the relation between myth and the “invention of tradition,” including nationalism) as well as the relative marginalization of certain intellectuals habitually associated with the topic. Nevertheless, his emphasis has the merit of providing a coherent thematic coverage of a particular epistemological understanding of myth and the imagination in modern Britain. It is a fresh approach that enables him to survey a wide range of figures, from the usual suspects (James George Frazer, Jesse Weston, T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkien), to less obvious figures (J. G. Ballard, Frank Kermode, Raymond Williams), to “outsiders” who played a surprising role in British cultural history, such as Carl Jung.

Sterenberg begins by showing how late Victorian anthropologists, and the Edwardian “Cambridge Ritualists,” helped transform Britain into a “myth-saturated culture” (18) by the early twentieth century. While E. B. Tylor, W. R. Smith, and Andrew Lang proclaimed that myths were characteristic forms of “primitive” thinking that had been superseded in the West by reason and science, the works of Jane Ellen Harrison and other Cambridge Ritualists promoted mythic thinking as both universal and necessary, its imaginative mode of apprehension providing a vital supplement to Western rationality. In addition, beginning in the 1890s Frazer's multivolume The Golden Bough was instrumental in making the materials of myth available for cultural appropriation.

Jesse Weston drew on both Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists for her influential study From Ritual to Romance (1920), which applied their insights to the native British stories of the Grail romance. It represented a “tipping point in the saturation of British literary culture” (41), inspiring many to engage in their own varieties of mythical thinking. While modernists like T.S. Eliot pursued what he called the “mythic method” during the interwar period, using myth as a formal structure to create order out of cultural fragmentation, Sterenberg shows that other British modernists (including John Cowper Powys, Mary Butts, Charles Williams, and David Jones) were drawn to the Grail quest because they believed its content embodied metaphysical truths. A similar faith in the “unique epistemology” (72) of myths characterized Tolkien's and C. S. Lewis's literary and critical projects. Tolkien insisted that the moral and spiritual truths of myth were not incompatible with modern reason, and Lewis contested analytic philosophy to show that myths were not nonsense even if they were unverifiable.

Sterenberg establishes that science fiction joined fantasy in retailing myths for British modernity. The British “New Wave” of the 1960s defined the genre as establishing myths for an age of technological innovation that traditional realism neglected, building on similar claims by Olaf Stapledon, J. B. Priestley, and Jung. Sterenberg insightfully analyzes Ballard, the New Wave writer whose self-proclaimed “myths of the near future” were meant to diagnose and ameliorate the alienating effects of modernity on the human psyche. Ballard was a Freudian; other New Wave writers considered Jung's discussion of myth as a resource to counterbalance the excessive materialism of modernity. Jung likened his personal search for individuation to the Grail quest, which helped make him a “spiritual sage” (125) among the public in Britain. Jung's heyday was in 1960s and 1970s, decades when British literary scholars and theologians also extolled the mythic dimensions of their disciplines to preserve them from being eclipsed by the growing influence of scientism within the Universities.

Sterenberg concludes this closely argued study with a set of stimulating questions for further research. One question he does not ask, but the reader may, is what happened to myth in Britain after the 1980s: his concluding chapters suggest that “mythic thinking” in the metaphysical sense became attenuated by the late 1970s. While myth remains alive in New Age movements, its epistemological status as a complement to science seems to have been undermined by the postmodern rejection of metaphysics, among other cultural developments; in mass culture today, myth is laden with irony, more Terry Pratchett than Tolkien. Like so many myths, Sterenberg's absorbing narrative demands a sequel.