POUR UNE REDÉFINITION DE LA RELATION MYTHE - LITTÉRATURE
FOR A REDEFINITION OF THE MYTH-LITERATURE RELATIONSHIP

Summary/Abstract: The concept of literary myth had been introduced in the domain of mythocritics by Pierre Albouy, in his notorious book. Since then, other specialists in mythocritics had discussed this concept, adopting or adapting Albouy’s definition. Most of them had adopted more comprehensive definitions for the literary myth, eliminating the ethnological fundament, which is at the very basis of Albouy’s definition. Thus, notorious histories as “Tristan and Iseult” of “Don Juan” were considered myths by some critics.Our aim in the present paper is to propose a personal classification of myths, based on the criteria of belief, which we consider the very heart of mythical thinking. Thus, we propose three categories of myth: the ethnologic myth, which is for us the myth defined by anthropologists and ethnologists, that is the sacred story of the archaic societies; then, we adopt Albouy’s category of the literary myth; finally, we propose the category of the literary-born myth, which is a story born in literature, but which states social behaviour or social types and in which its contemporaries believe.

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