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Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina Wilmington, 2009. / Title from PDF title page (January 12, 2010) Includes bibliographical references (p. 63-65)

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Thesis (M.A.)--Cleveland State University, 2008. / Abstract. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on July 11, 2008). Includes bibliographical references (p. 43-44). Available online via the OhioLINK ETD Center. Also available in print.

Theses (M.A.)--Marshall University, 2007. / Title from document title page. Includes abstract. Document formatted into pages: contains iv, 74 pages including illustrations. Bibliography: page 74.

This thesis provides a critical analysis of the use of folklore and mythology that exists in Neil Gaiman's award-winning novel, American Gods. I focus on the ways in which American Gods is situated within an intertextual corpus of mythological and mythopoeic writing. In particular, this study analyses Gaiman’s writing by drawing upon Mircea Eliade’s ideas about mythology and Northrop Frye’s archetypal criticism to discuss the emergence of secular myth through fantasy fiction.

M.A. / This dissertation considers how shifts in the representation of mythological figures, images and tales are reflective of shifts in social ideology. The texts with which this study is concerned have been chosen because of the ways in which they deal with mythological themes and images and their transference from one historical and ideological context to another. This transference is effected principally through the device of what Viktor Shklovsky called “defamiliarisation”. In Neil Gaiman‟s American Gods, the fictional America of the novel is the framing context in which Gaiman considers the nature of mythology as it begins to shift from the ancient to the new. American Gods reveals how the natures of gods and the narrative patterns through which their exploits are told to men are altered as social idioms change. The battle between the gods of ancient mythologies and those of the new world is illustrative of a society undergoing ideological and religious change, especially in the conception of the godhead. Although disparate in time, style and culture, the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf also engages with a mythological shift, from pagan to Christian mythological idiomatic thought. Beowulf, the great pagan warrior, and the creatures by which he finds himself confronted intermingle in complex ways to demonstrate the shift, not only in myth, but in the perception of its archetypal figures and their roles. In particular, it is the human element of mythology that is emphasised through the process of defamiliarisation. To illustrate how a text‟s mythology can be adapted in order to be relevant to a temporally and ideologically distant society, this study will also examine the adaptation of the poem Beowulf into two filmic narratives. Beowulf 2007 and Beowulf and Grendel, are both concerned with the process of myth creation and dissemination and display an awareness of their own statuses as constructed narratives. In so doing, they draw attention to the constructed nature of mythology and its ideology. The films defamiliarise Beowulf and through the translation and adaptation of the poem are able to reinvent and thus revive the poetic material.

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Les œuvres de Neil Gaiman sont souvent qualifiées de postmodernes dans la mesure où elles lient expérimentation et autoréflexivité à une démarche de fiction populaire qui leur paraît antagoniste. A l’inverse d'une œuvre postmoderniste typique, qui met en avant sa mise à nu des mécanismes fabulateurs, les métafictions et les parodies gaimaniennes restent des fictions fantastiques et merveilleuses où les enjeux fabulateurs (psychologie et parcours des personnages, intrigue, émotion et suspens) gardent leur place primordiale. Elles ne sont donc pas des œuvres expérimentales mêlées d'éléments de fiction populaire, mais des œuvres de fiction populaire autoréflexive. Cette posture singulière fait de ces œuvres un terrain d'exploration fertile pour la réflexion sur les spécificités de la fiction populaire, et sur la place privilégiée qu'y occupe la fabulation ("storytelling"), notion qu’Henri Bergson ou Frank McConnell considéraient comme le fil rouge entre l’écriture de fiction d’aujourd'hui et la mythopoèse religieuse d’autrefois. Cette dialectique instaurée entre fabulation, mythe et fiction populaire constitue le cœur thématique des œuvres de Gaiman, qui abondent en réécritures de mythes anciens, modernes, religieux, populaires, et en représentations de personnages d’écrivains et de conteurs traditionnels, ou de personae gaimaniennes, qui, au plus fort de l’intrigue comme aux confins du paratexte, au détour d’une préface ou d’une vignette de bande dessinée, forgent une représentation de la fiction comme mythe, de l’écrivain comme figure mythique du conteur, et de la fabulation comme activité humaine quintessentielle. / Neil Gaiman’s fantasy works are often deemed postmodernist since they experiment with self-reflexivity and mix it with a supposedly antagonistic impulse towards popular fiction. Typical postmodernist works mostly emphasize their attacks against the fictional illusions of referentiality, character or plot. On the contrary, Gaiman’s works unapologetically remain within the bounds of fantasy, a genre in which imagination and storytelling are paramount–along with their related issues: characterization, plot, emotion and suspense. Thus, Gaiman’s fiction is not experimental fiction enhanced with elements of popular fiction, but actual popular fiction made self-reflexive. Thanks to that peculiar mood, studying Gaiman’s work is a very fruitful means of investigating the distinctive features of popular fiction, and its inherent emphasis on storytelling–or, as Henri Bergson called it, “fabulation.” Both Bergson and Frank McConnell focused on this notion which they saw as the essential link between ancient mythmaking and today’s fiction writing. Gaiman’s fiction mostly relies on such a dialectics between myth, popular fiction and storytelling or fabulation. His fantasy stories constantly rewrite ancient, religious myths, modern myths or the “myths” of popular fiction, and feature many fictional and historical writers, traditional storytellers, or Gaiman’s own personae, so that in paratext as well as in the heart of a narrative, in the quiet and supposedly reliable words of an introduction as surely as on the most striking comics panels, fiction is portrayed as myth, writers as mythical avatars of some archetypal storyteller, and storytelling as the one, quintessential human act.

This thesis will explore the proposal that Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman is, as Gaiman describes it in its epilogue, a “story about stories” (The Wake, epilogue). Its particular focus will be on Gaiman’s conception of humans as essentially narrative beings, who use narratives to interact with the world around them, to impose order on information, to provide interpretive paradigms, and as models for their behaviour. Gaiman has not only explored this idea, but used the fantastic mode to create a universe in which these types of ‘interpretive narratives’ directly affect physical reality. Gaiman’s ideas about the way narratives work have been heavily influenced by both postmodern and Jungian legacies. The thesis will propose that the dynamic between postmodern intertextuality and the Jungian idea of the archetypes is a driving force in The Sandman. While Gaiman embraces a playful, bricoleur intertextuality, he also retains a belief that humans can invoke the archetypes to access profound meanings, which transcend the particularities of their expression in any individual instances. Under these influences, Gaiman concieves of a postmodern, Jungian approach to mythology. We will see that Gaiman’s interactions with narrative, postmodernism and Jungianism eventually lead him to formulate an ethic for the contemporary world, and that he encodes it in his own mythology. This ethic both empowers individuals and demands that they take responsibility for their power. It also focuses on how the individual can productively and tolerantly interact with a heteroglossic world. Instead of a fact to be sought out, meaning becomes a process of active creation.