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The authoritative 1890 edition with an introduction by Cairns Craig and Frazer’s own afterword
Published originally in two volumes in 1890, this extraordinary study of primitive myth and magic led Scottish anthropologist J.G. Frazer to identify parallel patterns of ritual, symbols and belief across many centuries and many different cultures. His observations on the mysteries of fertility and death, and the rites of the sacrificial king who must die to save his people, overturned much of contemporary intellectual thinking, not least because of the enlightening or ‘heretical’ parallels it suggested with the Christian religion.Frazer’s elegant and authoritative style, and the breadth of his 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.This definitive volume includes the unabridged original 1890 edition as well as several essays and lectures by Frazer.
“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
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“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
J.G. Frazer
J. G. Frazer (1854-1941) was born and educated in Glasgow, where he attended the University before going to Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1871 he became a Classics Fellow at Trinity. He was knighted in 1914. He translated work from Greek and wrote fiction, but he is best known as a pioneer of social anthropology and comparative ethnography. Although he has many other titles to his name, none were to have the wide-ranging social and imaginative impact of The Golden Bough (first published in 1890).