Description
Book SynopsisPublished originally in two volumes in 1890, this extraordinary study of primitive myth and magic, collected from sources around the world, led Frazer to identify parallel patterns of ritual, symbols and belief across many centuries and many different cultures.
Frazer's 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.
Trade ReviewFrazer'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
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 * *
