Joanna Kavenna won the Orange First Novel prize for her debut novel, Inglorious, in 2007. Her other works include The Ice Museum and The Birth of Love. Her journalism has appeared in the London Review of Books, the Guardian, and the New York Times. Here she speaks about the difference between ancient and modern myths, and how they often serve to highlight the surprising similarities of shared experience.
What are present-day myths, and how do they differ from the myths of older times?
Well, to take one kind of myth as an example, there's the hero’s journey: it’s one of these Ur myths, a very recurring myth. Joseph Campbell wrote about it as the monomyth: in other words, the kind of myth that is in almost everything. So you could say that the hero's journey is an ancient myth.
You could start by saying it comes through classical works, as far back as the epic of Gilgamesh, one of the most ancient myths that we have, from Sumeria. The basic idea is that the hero leaves the confines of their safe village, the place that they know, and they go out into the great world where they meet friends and foes. They fight battles and they suffer hardships and they gain revelations, and at the end they get a kind of prize, some sort of reward before going back to the village with their new-found knowledge.
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