Conclusion: Mythologies of the Past, Present and Future

Abstract

The analysis chapters of this book adopted DMA as a framework for analysing constructions of mythology. This analysis considered how the myth of the Blitz was constructed in responses by British newspapers to the 7 July bombings. In doing so, it has explored the ideological battleground that occurred through stories that invoked this myth. To conclude, I will now consider the contributions that these findings make to the theoretical and methodological fields of mythology and CDA respectively. This conclusion will show how theories of myth can be developed further from my observations in this book. I will also account for the continued importance of analysing mythological storytelling and provide some examples of cases when the myth of the Blitz has occurred since 2005. My analysis has shown that current models of myth are useful and applicable templates for understanding how myth functions through journalistic storytelling, historical memory and national identity. However, these approaches can be refined further still due to the historical and contextual nuances covered throughout my analysis. The discursive landscape I explored after 7 July became too complex for any single theory of myth to explain such nuances. On the one hand, mythological accounts of Britain in 1940 and contemporary perceptions of national identity reflect the dimensions of Barthes’ (1972) model, whilst replicating the archetypal conventions that other scholars of myth have explored (Campbell, 1949; Lule, 2001). But my work has also identified diachronic and synchronic complications that occur through recontextualisation in mythological storytelling; these being the discursive and ideological tensions that develop when a myth from one moment in time is reused in a different historical context.