Ritual, Myth and the Modernist Text : The Influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot and Woolf

First Published in 1998. Volume 12 in the Library of Anthropology series. This text traces the influence of Jane Ellen Harrison, a brilliant classicist and one of the 'Cambridge Anthropologists' on Jams Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Decade of critical over-emphasis on Sir James Frazer's influence on modernism have obscured the more important contributions of Harrison, who explored the chthonic Greek matriarchal cults prior to patriarchal Olympianism and originated the 'ritual theory', finding the origins of Greek drama- and ultimately of all art, in religious ritual. Harrison's images of matriarchal divinity and the feminist principles they embodied inspired these modernist writers to envision the young artist reborn as creator through symbolic union with the semiotic body.