The Golden Bough And Literary Anthropology

The Golden Bough was considered as one of most influential works about anthropology in the 20th century. What was more, it was also regarded as a literary critical works, which affected literary research profoundly in that time. This paper attempted to probe into the origin of the research methodological research about literaiy anthropology, which was started with analyzing this classical works, and then sorted out a clue of interactive development for the literature and the anthropology. The goal is trying to search for the possibility how to thoroughly carry on a new researching paradigm about this cross discipline.The first part of this paper was acquainted with main content about The Golden Bough and its researching methodology. Then generally introduced the Frazer's Ghost Idea, the Sympathetic Magic Thought, including the symbolic meaning of myths and rites in The Golden Bough .The second part was embarked on analyzing the relations between primitive thought researched and the literature and the literary criticism, the developing of the study of methodology about the literary anthropology clues were put in order, which covered, from myths and rituals to archetypal criticism. On the other hand, this part briefly introduced the Frye's Theory about archetypal criticism and traced back to his theoretical origin—Jung's Psycho-analysis Theory and Frazer's The Golden Bough, and then elaborated the influence to literary anthropology caused by The Golden Bough; The third part was stated by two different directions that literary anthropology researched, which referred to literary anthropology and the anthropology literature. And in this way, the paper was analyzed rationally by the researching methodology of literary anthropology and its developing direction. The fourth part was a conclusion according to the whole paper. In the research field of literary anthropology, with the introduction of research technique about anthropology and the reconsideration to the disciplinary division, which learners worked out explicitly, this discipline will be able to be developed day by day.