REVIEW ARTICLE 49 the present is caused by the past, and the mythical understanding that history is divorced from origins. The author argues that the central romantic myth of Paradise Lost and its view on history as 'an expulsion from the Garden of Eden' incorporates the idea of 'irreversible change' into history. The Hegelian dialectic suggesting three stages: Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis, finds a parallel in Paradise Lost—Fall-Utopia. Thus the linear view of history henceforth is changed to the cyclical vision, whereby history should fulfil the goal of reintegration. The growth of liberal individualism in this period gave rise to the romantic expression of myth as national soul reflected in the 'natural' 'unspoilt' Volk. This in turn encouraged the discovery of the unknown and the natural and the colonisation of the non-European world was the obvious option to unite them to the 'civilized*. Labanyi has also discussed the late nineteenth century theories underlining the 'savage' aspect, as suggested by James Frazer in the The Golden Bough and by Wagner in Ring. They welcome destruction as a prerequisite to regeneration. The Nitzscheian understanding of myth, i.e. 'a creative form of dreaming' and 'willed forgetting* gave a big jolt to the European man's 'superiority* based on classical mythology, which in turn forced them to adopt what they had called 'barbarism*. The Freudian theory of Oedipus complex dealt the final blow to the romantic notion of origin and naturalness. Freud finds 'primitive man' within the civilised one. He explains that 'myth takes us back to the infancy of civilisation* because 'infancy represents original state prior to repression* and that 'civilisation began when man leamt to repress the infantile urges'. These observations of Freud gave a new direction to the whole debate on history and myth. Though Freud did not apply his theory of the unconscious (psyche governed by the pleasure principle as opposed to the reality principle) to the study of myth, it greatly contributed to the sustenance of interest in myth by modernist writers of Europe. However, the modernists misread the Freudian text because, as has been pointed out by Labanyi, 'If writers and painters insisted on the "illogical integrity" of the symbolic language of the unconscious, Freud was concerned with rationally analysing its underlying meaning.' The modernists ignored reason which was progressive and adopted the unconscious which was regressive and retrograde. Labanyi has also discussed the Jungian quest of myth in comparison with that of Freud. He argues that Jung's anti-politicism and Eliad's (Romanian scholar of comparative religion) anti-historicism laid the basis of the American School of Myth Criticism, according to which the universal archetypes of myths are dissociated from history—a view totally unacceptable to Labanyi as evident all along in this study. Further, the book throws some light on the Structuralists who readily accepted the position taken by Myth Criticism as it suited