The Power of Myth (1988) by Joseph Campbell

When

I read this during my doctoral program.

Why

The more I started reading scholarship related to superheroes, the more references I came across to Campbell’s work.

How

Campbell’s investigation into the cross-cultural themes (e.g., sacrifice, resilience, justice) within various stories told and preserved throughout the centuries fits well with my work. One of the guiding assumptions of this work, shared yesterday in a conference presentation, is that in many ways, superheroes reflect and appeal to certain abstract concepts that research from various approaches suggest are generally understood across cultures in fundamentally similar ways. This “conceptual consistency” may also help explain the genre’s cross-generational appeal.