Because its topic is not so much the study of myth as much as it is theories of myth, this book aims at a rather precise goal: to make a contribution to writing a history of ideas in the twentieth century. Twentieth Century Mythologies does this by offering a comparative epistemology to examine the diverse scholarly definitions of, and hypotheses concerning, myth and myths--assembling both theorists and theories into a coherent picture in which the specific place, contributions, as well as shortcomings, of each becomes apparent. While the book examines in detail the influential work of three great scholars: the noted Indo-Europeanist Georges Dumezil, the structuralist anthropologist Claude Levis-Strauss, and the historian of religions Mircea Eliade. Taken together, the scholarly productions of these authors comprise the twentieth-century's body of work, or discourse, on myth(s).First published in France in 1993.