LitMUSE

Archetypes reflect universal, primitive, and elemental patterns whose effective embodiment in a literary work evokes a profound response from the reader. They manifest as narrative designs, character types, images identifiable in a wide variety of works of literature, myths, dreams, and ritualized modes of social behavior. Anthropologist J. G. Frazer, in his work The Golden [...]

The gods of Greek myth were invented by the people in an attempt to rationalize and explain the world around them. Before people can feel secure in their worlds, they must orient themselves therein; i.e., they must tentatively define what they believe to be the nature of the world so that they may develop a [...]