Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship by Bruce Lincoln

In Theorizing Myth, Bruce Lincoln traces the way scholars and others have used the category of "myth" to fetishize or deride certain kinds of stories, usually those told by others.
He begins by showing that mythos yielded to logos not as part of a (mythic) "Greek miracle," but as part of struggles over political, linguistic, and epistemological authority occasioned by expanded use of writing and the practice of Athenian democracy. Lincoln then turns his attention to the period when myth was recuperated as a privileged type of narrative, a process he locates in the political and cultural ferment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here, he connects renewed enthusiasm for myth to the nexus of Romanticism, nationalism, and Aryan triumphalism, particularly the quest for a language and set of stories on which nation-states could be founded.
In the final section of this wide-ranging book, Lincoln advocates a fresh approach to the study of myth, providing varied case studies to support his view of myth—and scholarship on myth—as ideology in narrative form.

Review:
The book is simply more than what many of the reviewers have stated. It is multi-faceted in its approach and the epitome of acadmemic scholarship. Lincoln works with a dozen languages and takes on the masters and mentors of his own field: The History of Religions. He deconstructs their mythology and interrogates a century of German nationalist thought–the basis of which became the foundation for the ideologies of anti-semitism. Additionally, Lincoln's efforts here have given me a renewed faith in historical methodology, illustrating by example that "showing your work" via the footnote and a careful reading of the primary and secondary material, that one can truly challenge those mythologies that continue to subvert our own imaginaries. This is History at its finest!