L’état positiviste, le dernier, l’actuel, sera l’état du bonheur humain permis par le progrès des sciences et des techniques” 1. Gilbert Durand in Introduction à la mythodologie describes this sidelining as follows : “Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte ont une philosophie progressiste de l’histoire et l’« imaginaire » est bien de façon manifeste chez eux repoussé dans les limbes préhistoriques, dans des « états » – « théologique » puis « métaphysique » – obscurantistes et médiévaux.

Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth Centur (.)ġW hat happens to myth and mythical allusion in the so-called “classic realist text” of the nineteenth century ? How does it co-habit with the new empirical discourses of science and politics which were becoming more and more the stuff of fiction and literature ? Do the allusions to classical and Christian mythology, which continue to permeate the texts of a “realist” writer like George Eliot, function as a common intertext, a consecrated body of shared knowledge encouraging a consensual reading practice and providing a “key” to understanding the nineteenth century text ? Or on the contrary, is the discourse of myth to be read as a jarring intrusion into the more empirical, positivist discourses of the day which would willingly confine myth to a purely decorative function ? The nineteenth century saw the triumph of the philosophical “positivism” of Auguste Comte, a philosophy which tended to sideline the aesthetic imagination and what was seen as the “obscurantism” of myth in favour of an emphasis on the rationality and objectivity of scientific naturalism. 1 Gilbert Durand, Introduction à la mythodologie, Paris, Albin Michel, 1996, p.

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