This Master's thesis examines the status of myth and symbol in postmodern religious discourse, and proposes a new way of understanding representation in religion. The first chapter deals with the sense of symbol as it emerged out of literary and philosophical romanticism, and explores several divergent interpretations of the meaning of the symbol according to modernist and structuralist criticism. The second chapter, after analysing the function of myth and history in religious understanding, connects the romantic symbol to a contemporary hermeneutics based on the aesthetic and epistemological tenets of magic realism. It is my contention in this thesis that magic realism, in its conflation (and deconstruction) of the ideologically charged dichotomy of myth and reality, provides a hermeneutical tool with which to critique demythologization; and that, in its dual aspect as heir to both romanticism and realism, magic realism may be a more fertile source than either neo-romanticism or post-structuralism for a truly postmodern religious criticism.

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