The Golden Bough

A Study in Comparative Religion

JG Frazer author Cairns Craig editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Canongate Books

Published:24th May '04

Should be back in stock very soon

The Golden Bough cover

Published originally in two volumes in 1890, this extraordinary study of primitive myth and magic, collected from sources around the world, led Frazer to identify parallel patterns of ritual, symbols and belief across many centuries and many different cultures.
Frazer's learning inspired a whole generation of ethnographers and comparative anthropologists, and had a particularly powerful effect on many other thinkers and writers such as Sigmund Freud, D H Lawrence, Joyce, Yeats and T S Eliot.

Frazer's work has epic scale yet mesmerizing fineness of detail. We see the great structures of civilization forming and melting against a background of elemental mystery. The effect is cinematic and sublime. What I took from Frazer is his narrative sweep, multicultural sympathy and structuralist technique . . . The Golden Bough is like music - the dark resonance of Johannes Brahms' four symphonies, which inspired my "reading" of Western culture and its recurrent themes. -- Camille Paglia
Equally remarkable for its vast assembly of facts and its unusual charm of presentation. Few men of such learning have written more attractively. * * Concise Cambridge History of English Literature * *

ISBN: 9781841954325

Dimensions: 196mm x 126mm x 39mm

Weight: 618g

944 pages

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