Sir James George Frazer, 1854-1941
Biographical note
Scottish anthropologist, chiefly known for his work The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion. It first was published in two volumes in 1890; the third edition, published 1906–15, comprised twelve volumes. It was aimed at a broad literate audience raised on tales as told in such publications as Thomas Bulfinch's The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes (1855). It offered a modernist approach to discussing religion, treating it as a cultural phenomenon rather than from a theological perspective. The impact of The Golden Bough on contemporary European literature was substantial.
Works
- Totemism [1887]
- The Golden Bough: a study of magic and religion
- 1st edition [1890]
- 2nd edition: expanded to 6 volumes [1900]
- 3rd edition: 12 volumes [1906-15; 1936]
- 1922 one-volume abridgement
- Descriptions of Greece, by Pausanias [translation and commentary, 1897]
- Psyche's Task [1909]
- Totemism and Exogamy [1910]
- The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead [3 volumes, 1913-24]
- Folk-lore in the Old Testament [1918]
- The Library, by Apollodorus [text, translation and notes, 2 volumes 1921]
- The Worship of Nature [1926 (from 1923-25 Gifford Lectures)]
- The Gorgon's Head and other Literary Pieces [1927]
- Man, God, and Immortality [1927]
- Devil's Advocate [1928]
- Fasti, by Ovid [text, translation and commentary, 5 volumes 1929; one-volume abridgement 1931; revised by G. P. Goold 1989, corr. 1996]
- Myths of the Origin of Fire [1930]
- The Growth of Plato's Ideal Theory [1930]
- Garnered Sheaves [1931]
- Condorcet on the Progress of the Human Mind [1933]
- The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion [1933-36]
- Creation and Evolution in Primitive Cosmogenies, and other pieces [1935]
