Thought experiment - What do Star-Wars, Homer's The Odyssey, and Shrek all have in common?
This is where we can summarise and recap what we have covered so far.
Carl Jung: Separates human thought into three levels and categories, the ego, the unconscious, and the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious refers to the part of the unconscious mind which is derived from ancestral memory and experience and is common to all humankind, as distinct from the individual's unconscious. The Hero Myth AKA The Mono-myth - a universal category of tales focused on a hero overcoming a crisis, and returning home a changed person. Joseph Campbell: The Hero with a 1000 Faces - first wrote about how all heroes are the same, and undergo the same journey.
Romantics (Late 18th Century England): Focused on poetry, lyrical and descriptive language, and common, everyday experiences. Victorian (Early 19th Century): Religion started to lose control over population as industrialisation and science grew. Charles Darwin was a big factor in this. Literature was used to control the lower classes, and teach them not to rise up.
20th/21st Century: Literature is seen as a way of encouraging self-discovery, and a way of connecting to diverse human experiences, beyond what a reader is acquainted with. Archetypal Theory: A theory that literature and media are bound by the archetypes they employ - these archetypes are universal, throughout history and across cultures.