Myth and Method

Wendy Doniger holds the Mircea Eliade Chair at Chicago, and co-editing a University of Virginia Press collection with her is a credential that means something — this is a serious scholarly engagement with how myth studies should proceed after Campbell, Eliade, Dumezil, and Levi-Strauss. The essays are rigorously trained on real methodological questions. The evidence stops short of demonstrating exceptional impact, though: the public review record is thin and some essays will feel dated thirty years on. For a graduate student in religious studies or classics, it earns its shelf space.