Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Creation of any myth.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

mytho- + -poeia, dated 1951 CE, based on Ancient Greek μυθοποιία (mythopoiía, "I make myth").

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Examples

  • In Adonais, Shelley having, as Actaeon, transgressed "across the threshold" to be slain by his own "hunter's dart" [297] enacts the kill, which sublates his mythopoeia, raising it as "the One" to its abstract essence.

    Romanticism, Alchemy, and Psychology 2008

  • JRR Tolkien referred to fantasy writing as mythopoeia, the creation of myth for the modern era.

    Archive 2010-04-01 2010

  • JRR Tolkien referred to fantasy writing as mythopoeia, the creation of myth for the modern era.

    Fantasy Fiction: The Battle For Meaning Continues 2010

  • Personally, I think responsible fantasy world-building mirrors the pre-modern narrative, favoring the oral traditions and mythopoeia the creation of twentieth century fantasy drew from.

    Archive 2008-06-01 Megan Arkenberg 2008

  • Personally, I think responsible fantasy world-building mirrors the pre-modern narrative, favoring the oral traditions and mythopoeia the creation of twentieth century fantasy drew from.

    Core on a Cord Megan Arkenberg 2008

  • John Barth has described Cat Rambo's writings as "works of urban mythopoeia"—her stories take place in a universe where chickens aid the lovelorn, Death is just another face on the train, and a rodent's wooing can affect an entire subterranean city.

    The Surgeon's Tale Walter Jon Williams 2007

  • John Barth has described Cat Rambo's writings as "works of urban mythopoeia"—her stories take place in a universe where chickens aid the lovelorn, Death is just another face on the train, and a rodent's wooing can affect an entire subterranean city.

    Archive 2007-11-01 Walter Jon Williams 2007

  • A direct invitation to a free-for-all race for dispossession, justified on the grounds of the keeper's unworthiness, it recalls other schizophrenic conditions which are mother to, for instance, the far more lethal, dark mythopoeia of

    Wole Soyinka - Nobel Lecture 1986

  • HE has reached a stage of culture where such mythopoeia has become impossible.

    The Invention of a New Religion Basil Hall Chamberlain 1892

  • For mythopoeia is just this, the incarnating the spirit of natural fact; and the generic name of that power is Art. A kind of creation, a clothing of essence in matter, an hypostatising (if you will have it) of an object of intuition within the folds of an object of sense.

    Earthwork out of Tuscany Being Impressions and Translations of Maurice Hewlett Maurice Hewlett 1892

Comments

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  • mythopoeia

    April 18, 2009

  • "Choosing between subversion + fairy tale adaptations or Arthurian mythopoeia and identity narratives is like choosing a favorite child." -Twitter

    See also mythopoesis.

    October 25, 2015

  • This is one of those words that is pronounced in starkly different fashion on opposite sides of the Atlantic. In England the word rhymes with Ethiopia; in the U.S. It rhymes with gonorrhea.

    June 26, 2016

  • A lifetime of bills in arrear

    Trump paints as a golden career!

    For avid bullshitters

    It's not gold that glitters

    But polished brass mythopoeia.

    June 26, 2016