Joseph Campbell's pattern of the hero who leaves home, passes trials, wins a decisive victory and returns transformed. Folklorists criticize it as oversimplified, but it deeply influenced screenwriting and fantasy storytelling.
Origin
Set out in Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949); he borrowed the word from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939).
Quick answers
- What does "Monomyth" mean?
- Joseph Campbell's pattern of the hero who leaves home, passes trials, wins a decisive victory and returns transformed. Folklorists criticize it as oversimplified, but it deeply influenced screenwriting and fantasy storytelling.
- Where does the term "Monomyth" come from?
- Set out in Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949); he borrowed the word from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939).