This chapter looks at how and why Churchill has become such a divisive figure. It opens with a description of recent debates in the public discourse and on social media. It then briefly discuses Churchill’s reputation during his lifetime before recounting the role that he played in shaping his own legacy through his words, written and spoken, and through the creation of his archive and official biography. The authors then examine the long and complex historiography of Churchill, highlighting some of the most significant challenges to the dominant Churchillian narrative. Particular attention is paid to the more recent politicising of Churchill as a result of debates over Brexit, empire and race.

Freud’s intense faith in Jung, a man he had called the “Joshua” to his Moses, and whom he declared would be his successor at a time when psychoanalysis needed a “Christ,” ended in a hermeneutic battle over the Prophet Jonah. This chapter explores how the biblical story of Jonah became the site for working out the differentiation between the Viennese school and Zurich school of psychoanalysis. I argue that the forgotten Jonah trail is worth recovering because Freud’s repudiation of the Biblical hermeneutics surrounding the myth of Jonah largely determined the end of Freud and Jung’s collaboration and, at the same time, influenced Freud’s subsequent attitude to and writings on Biblical prophets. Freud’s taciturn, oppositional, and hitherto unanalyzed discursive relationship with the prophet Jonah sheds new light on psychoanalytic literature on Biblical myth, its reception, and even its consequent influence on the movement after 1913.

This book revives a contested moment in the history of aesthetic theory when Romantic-period writers exploit the growing awareness of irresolutions in Kant’s third Kritik, especially in his critique of judgements of the sublime. Read with hindsight, these openings can be seen to have generated literary opportunities for writings that explicitly embraced the philosophical significance delegated to the aesthetic by Kant, but then took advantage of the licence he had conceded. Romantic writing claimed a wider significance of its own that philosophy now had to learn to rationalise. Consequent aesthetic reorientations, in which splendours and miseries become interchangeable, reflect political instabilities already exploited by feminist and nationalist writing. Falling becomes a kind of rising, and literature’s unregulated power of metamorphosis persuasively challenges hierarchies of all kinds, including its own.

In elections the fiction of popular sovereignty makes its strongest approach to reality, as actual people ostensibly go about selecting from among themselves the few to whose government they consent. In many elections the ostensible comes close to the actual, the fiction momentarily approaches the fact, and our belief in the sovereignty of the people – or our willingness to suspend disbelief – is heightened. But not always.

This chapter understands international law as more than a technocratic device to engineer changes in human behaviour and the environment. Law is a social and cultural process guided by myth and narrative. This chapter seeks new and better narratives to contest the foundational myths of modernity and development that shape our discipline and world. Rather than crafting new norms from the conventional centres of geopolitical power in the West and universalising them, this chapter calls for pluralised value formation that learns from diverse legal traditions. Such a myth protects the environment through transforming the process of global value formation. The chapter first examines how nature shapes mythology, looking at the role of the cosmic horizon in shaping social norms. It argues that the nexus of cosmos, nature and myth-making is not a phenomenon of ages past but plays a role in contemporary international environmental law. The chapter asks whether the discovery of countless Earth-like planets today could help us reimagine our Earth and global community in a healthier way, and considers the implications of our expanding cosmic horizon for rethinking international law and policy.

The introduction to Hierarchies at Home presents the central argument: Although women of African descent only briefly made up the majority of domestic servants in Cuba before 1959, for the entirety of the twentieth century the archetypal figure of a domestic servant in Cuba was an African-descended woman. The centrality of the black Cuban woman to the image of domestic service mattered because the work was a primary way that racialized hierarchies reproduced in Cuba throughout the twentieth century. Cuba’s public-facing image after its war for independence was a country founded on anti-racist ideals. But the steady association between blackness and domestic service sustained and revealed a stratification that placed African-descended Cubans in positions of subservience to white Cubans and ran counter to the public image. The introduction briefly reviews literature on domestic service in the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America, and outlines the chapters.

Chapter 12 applies what we have learned from prehistory to explain why religions exist and how they emerged and persisted into the present day even while their precepts are clearly contrary to all that we have learned from science. Looking at the present human challenges of warfare and terrorism from an evolutionary standpoint helps readers to better understand and deal with the problems of our modern globalized world.

Religious networks were part of the Ancient Greek economy and formed the basis of the Greek expansion in the Mediterranean. From the archaic period onwards, emporia and port cities were cosmopolitan environments in which different rituals and cults coexisted. Sanctuaries hosted cults, which often supported the activity of traders, but they were themselves economic centers under the authority of Greek cities. The property of the gods soon became the basis of economic development, including building activity, lending, and renting practices. As business units, Greek sanctuaries easily attracted large numbers of people, especially during religious festivals. They facilitated the development of commercial activities thanks to their financial capacity. The interactions of a sanctuary thus created several forms of sociability not limited to trade with the gods. Through several institutional mechanisms, as for instance asylia, many Greek cities were able to make their sanctuaries protected places where common codes of behavior applied to all participants. Myths and cults also supported the initiatives of cities to build new networks.

This chapter furthers the discourse on “narrative” with specificity on “magic, memory, myth, and metaphor.” Herein, the chapter shows that the knowledge of the past is preserved in oral vehicles as “songs, images, poems, rituals and religions, stories and myths,” as memories not only preserve but sustain them by transporting them to succeeding generations, using narrative when evoked. It also examines memory’s limitations, especially when compared to history. They include “bias (of the narrator), misinformation, infallibility and the impossibility of rightly (in)validating (individual) memories”–the lack of corroborator. It is also prone to manipulation and subject to the narrator’s interest, while the information processed and stored as memory can also fade over time owing to the collection of new memories. In the Yoruba context, the chapter highlights the relationship between “Itan” and “Aroba,” with the major distinguishing factor being their timeframe from the period of happening. The chapter also dwells on collective memory, which relies on individuals’ narration to become one because no one person was present everywhere to witness everything at once. Lastly, there is the clarification of the different problems in African epistemology, such as magic and the likes.

Around 500 CE Colluthus, writing in Greek, and Dracontius, writing in Latin, each composed an epyllion on the Abduction of Helen. However, apart from title, date, and genre, the two works have very little in common. This chapter presents an interpretation of the two poems that connects them with contemporary historical and social developments. On the one hand, the role of Hermione in Colluthus is connected with the changing role of children in late antique society, under the influence of Christian morality. On the other, the attitude towards Vergil in Dracontius is explained from the late antique political context (being after the fall of Rome) and the perspective of the author as an advocate in Carthage under Vandal rule. A comparison between the two poems sheds interesting light on how the ‘antehomeric’ narrative was adapted respectively in the East and the West: in Colluthus' Egypt and in Dracontius' Africa.

At the turn of the millennium, Jorge Volpi and Ignacio Padilla received criticism from the Mexican literary establishment for ‘renouncing their Mexicanity’ by not dealing with Mexican themes in En busca de Klingsor and Amphitryon respectively. Chapter 3 examines this phenomenon in the context of Mexican cultural and political history. It argues that, with the fall of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) after 71 years, Volpi and Padilla perceived a unique historic opportunity to re-configure the relationship between intellectuals and the state. Through an analysis of the themes of ‘myth’ and Nazism in these novels, as well as in Cambio de piel by Carlos Fuentes and Morirás lejos by Jose Emilio Pacheco, structuralist and post-structuralist understandings of myth are compared. It is further argued that Volpi and Padilla engage in a narrative rehearsal of Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion that literature’s task is to ‘interrupt the myth’ of (national) identity.

This chapter considers the myth of the perfect body image and the critical role played by the mass media in influencing people's self-image and informing ideals of what is considered beautiful or attractive. The way in which body image is affected by psychosocial factors is analyzed. Many theories and much scientific research about this topic are introduced, followed by an overview of body dysmorphic disorder, and a broad summary of vigorexia (bigorexia), a new and increasingly common disorder, along with several theories and scientific research. Finally, the way in which these two diseases correlate with the myth of the perfect body image is analyzed.

This chapter explores different attempts at understanding antisemitism and engages with philosophical, religious, and psychoanalytical theories.

Unemployment, hunger, and declining craft status were more significant than the formal ideas most historians have attended to in radicalising London’s poor. Few of the poor wanted outright revolution. Rather, their mental worlds were packed by a melange of myths, slogans, and ‘intellectual bric-a-brac’, and naïve fantasies and wishful thoughts about the prospects of change. Myths about a golden past, the ‘free-born Englishman’, and the oppressions of the Norman Yoke were spread in songs and slogans of considerable antiquity, and provided the primary languages of radical dissent.

What did Plato mean when in Timaeus he characterised his account of the created world as an εἰκὼς μῦθος? The phrase is typically translated ‘a probable story’, ‘a likely tale’. Connotations that modern empiricist philosophy of science might attach to those expressions are misleading. Careful attention to the two terms Plato uses, and their resonances in previous Greek literature and thought, suggests instead the strikingly oxymoronic: ‘a rational/reasonable myth’. This is not, however, the reasonableness of deduction or of inference to the best explanation, but of the practical reasoning in which a supremely good designer would probably engage, assuming that he wanted to make his product as like himself as possible, but from materials with their own properties not of his making. Practical wisdom cannot aspire to the same standards of rigour as theoretical wisdom can. It can attempt only the most reasonable option given such constraints – as could any account of why that choice was made. Hence the importance of the Timaeus’ initial reminder of Socrates’ construction of a political order (witness the Republic), and its address to a company competent in politics as well as mathematics, interested no less in κόσμος as political order than in cosmology.

Chapter 3 reveals how long-forgotten popular novels become important intertexts for canonical fiction on hermaphrodism. Whether the influence is intentional and acknowledged as Balzac admits of Latouche’s Fragoletta, or perhaps unintentional or repressed as may have been the case with Cuisin’s Clémentine, these popular novels become a “missing link” between medical discourse and fictional representations of androgyny. In both Fragoletta and Clémentine, for example, doctors and medical sex determinations play important roles in plot development, which allows us to reconsider the stakes of Mademoiselle de Maupin’s transing enterprise, described by Gautier as a “medical” project. By examining classic fiction by Balzac, Gautier, and Zola through the lens of forgotten popular novels, we can see how works that have been described by literary critics as rehearsing a timeless version of myth are also interrogating the very same social anxiety one finds in contemporary debates surrounding hermaphrodism in medicine and the law. Just like their medical counterparts, novelists experiment with hermaphrodism using their own literary techniques, harnessing the power of unknown sex as a means to keep the reader reading.

Let us return to eternity, which in truth we have not ever fully left since the opening chapter.

Who are these Romanian Germans? This chapter maps out the materials from which Romanian Germans constructed their identity from the late nineteenth century into the interwar period. It starts with an overview of the history of Germans in the region before engaging in detail with three key identity myths that emerged from and around that history. The final section embeds those identity narratives in a transnational web of reception and affirmation spanning interwar Europe. In making sense of their experiences in the twentieth century, this chapter argues, Germans in Romania used long-standing narratives that had been important to the two communities of Saxons and Swabians, picking and choosing older ‘foundation myths’ from these groups according to the needs of the circumstances in which they found themselves. These myths were highly malleable and usable by a variety of actors in the community, not just elites. Romanian Germans thus returned to three key themes time and again: Saxon privilege and superiority, a sense of being under siege, and the Swabian path of ordeal.