Handbook of Classical Mythology

Like Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings or the fictional Old West or feudal Japan in samurai films, classical mythology consists not only of a corpus of stories but also of a world, one with a geography and a history as well as relationships and rules and narrative conventions. Whereas most works on classical mythology focus their attention on the stories, neglecting the world in which they are situated, the present book explores both elements in an effort to give each its due. The result is a sort of ethnography of the imaginary.