Why are myths, legends, folktales, and fairy tales relevant to the contemporary world?
I’m not sure why relevance should be a criteria for literature. I say this not because you necessarily think it should be, Matt, but because so many critics seem to think so. What does relevance mean, exactly? Does it mean that a story should show us only the society we inhabit? Does it mean (it often does mean) that it should teach us something, rouse us to reform our society? That seems to me rather Victorian, as though every book should be Nicholas Nickleby. Of course there’s no reason that literature shouldn’t be relevant. But, and I don’t quite know how to say this, relevance is a secondary concern. The first concern is love. If we didn’t love Shakespeare, we wouldn’t care about his relevance, about whether his historical plays are critiques of the monarchy. If we didn’t love Jane Austen, it wouldn’t matter to us whether or not, in Mansfield Park, she is referring to the slave trade. Literature is not primarily important because it’s relevant but because we love it, because we rea
