literature and consciousness may enable us to reconstrue the rela-
tionship between myth and literature and thus to improve our com-
prehension of what happens when we create and read literature and
when we think about and use myth. ² In regard to fiction, such
revisionist efforts have been undertaken since 1970, with critics such
as Vickery, William Righter, Jacqueline de Weever, and John White
focusing on the ways that fiction writers have used myth in the
twentieth century.

But despite this positive direction in myth criticism, most critics
continue to treat myth in fiction from the vantage point of author
first, reader last (or not at all). This approach begs many crucial
questions, from the most evident--Can myth play any role unless a
reader recognizes its presence?--to the most controversial--What
constitutes validity in interpretation when myth is involved? In
our current critical climate where poststructuralist theories have
challenged the autonomy of the text and where some critics are
arguing that the text is always only a projection of the reader, these
practical questions have immense theoretical repercussions. Most
importantly, they force us to rethink how we address the matter of
a myth's functions in fiction. As Vickery acknowledges, specific
"uses" of a myth in certain literary works are "perhaps preeminently,
a function of the critical activity, of consciousness as constitutive, of
the reader as 'formularizing' agent. " ³

So far as I know, only White has attempted to describe systemati-
cally the dynamics of reading "mythological fiction." ⁴ Yet while his
studies have turned attention to the reader, they have not adequately
dealt with all areas of the reader's participation. For one thing, they
center primarily upon what happens as we read such fiction and do
not help us to understand what also happens after we read these
narratives--the point at which interpretation becomes more deliber-
ate. White himself concedes that we must go outside myth criti-
cism--to the reader-response investigations of Wolfgang Iser ⁵ and
the personal hermeneutics of Roland Barthes in S/Z--to find models
that might help to explain the reasoning process a reader follows in
interpreting mythological fiction. However, because these models
describe reading in general or the experience of an individual reading

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