SOURCE: Segal, Robert A. “Frazer and Campbell on Myth: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Approaches.” The Southern Review 26, no. 2 (spring 1990): 470-76.

In the following essay, Segal contrasts the work and ideology of Campbell and James Frazer.

No two writers on myth have been more popular than James Frazer and Joseph Campbell. Yet few others have had more mixed professional receptions. Frazer sought acclaim among anthropologists but became outdated within his lifetime. While Campbell was never taken seriously by folklorists, he cultivated a popular rather than academic following.

Both figures have nevertheless thrived as authorities elsewhere in the intellectual world—in literary circles above all. As John Vickery, Stanley Edgar Hyman, and others have shown, Frazer influenced not only leading modernist poets and novelists—notably, Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence, and Joyce—but also many leading scholars of literature: for example, Jessie Weston on the Grail legend, E. M. Butler on the Faust...