20th-Century Anglo-American History and the Modernist “Mythic Method”

Writing about late nineteenth and twentieth century modernism in 1993, David Hollinger tentatively distinguished “Knowers” (scientists) from “Artificers” (artists), while speculating that, “in the long run we shall come to speak routinely of ‘modernism’ as a persuasion embracing both…” In the decades since Hollinger made this prediction, interdisciplinary scholars of aesthetic modernism have increasingly understood it in precisely this way: as embracing antinomies in a tense equilibrium. This complementary outlook of aesthetic modernism subtly pervaded twentieth-century Anglo-American historical practice. My talk will examine one significant intersection between history and aesthetic modernism: the redefinition of myth as a narrative mode incorporating cognition and artifice, empiricism and imagination.

For modernists like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and W. B. Yeats, myths provided an antidote to the sterile instrumental rationality that seemed to characterize modernity, and helped to re-enchant a disenchanted world. Eliot’s friend, British historian R. G. Collingwood, and two Presidents of the AHA, Carl Becker and William J. McNeill, echoed this modernist turn toward rehabilitating myth as a useful – and even necessary – analytical category. They defined their own role as modern myth-creators (in McNeil’s term, “mythistorians”). Like the modernists, they turned to myths as a way to counter the perceived currents of scientism in their discipline, as well as to make history relevant to a broader public seeking meaning in an age of flux and uncertainty. The social sciences certainly made inroads into the historical profession, yet the profession itself was also indebted to aesthetic modernism and its mythopoetic concerns.