While “myth criticism” of the archetypal variety may have gone somewhat out of fashion, myth itself has not. The eight essays in The Persistence of Myth affirm the continuing significance of a range of myths—Oedipus, Saint Mary, the Fall—for contemporary theory and criticism of different methodologies. The subtitle of the book names only psychoanalytic and structuralist approaches, but the perspectives of feminism, new historicism, and poststructuralism are to be found here too.

The first essay, “The Devil's Elixirs, Jung's ‘Theology,’ and the Dissolution of Freud's ‘Poisoning Complex,’” by John Kerr, argues for the importance of E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1816 novel in the development of psychoanalytic theory and in the changing personal relationship between Jung and Freud. The Devil's Elixirs not only adumbrates all of Jung's major archetypes,