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Scholars have long recognized the influence of the Cambridge Ritualists (the “myth and ritual school”) on Ralph Ellison’s life and work. Primarily, given Ellison’s many statements regarding the birth of Invisible Man, this has been limited to discussions of Ellison’s use of Lord Raglan’s The Hero. However, archival research in Ellison’s collected papers and preserved library reveals a much more complex portrait of Ellison’s reading of the Ritualists. In this chapter, I draw on this archival evidence to reconstruct the significant insights that Ellison drew from Raglan (and not just The Hero), Jane Harrison, George Thomson, and A. M. Hocart.
Woolf calls Hardy “the greatest tragic writer among English novelists,” and I argue that she shares his tragic sense. Both a “Dionysiac” view of time as unceasing flux (the view held by Friedrich Nietzsche, Jane Ellen Harrison, and Henri Bergson) and a mathematical view of time as abstract continuum (the view held by Bertrand Russell) make for tragedy in Woolf’s fiction. Her novels are devoid of the ritual and mythic consolations so often misattributed to ancient drama. Woolf’s Dionysiac time is severed from Dionysiac rituals’ cyclical renewals. Woolf’s mathematical time is severed from redemptive myth. Like Darwin, Woolf makes tragic chance inseparable from the theater of life. Woolf depicts the nonteleological, nonanthropocentric change and persistence of nonhuman nature, as well as the inhuman permanence of Russell’s “universals.” To the Lighthouse and The Waves set the “still space” of characters’ most cherished moments against “the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars.” Woolf’s fiction accentuates time’s passing and models characters’ Sisyphean resistance to it.
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