MARLPIT PRESSIndependent PublisherSome books refuse a single shelf. The New Republic is a Victorian society novel built from philosophy and caricature. Xiyou bu is a seventeenth-century continuation of Journey to the West that becomes a dream about desire and unstable identity. Otto Rank’s The Myth of the Birth of the Hero sits between comparative mythology and early psychoanalysis.
This part of the catalog is where literary form and intellectual history most visibly meet. The research notes follow edition history, authorship, influence, and the arguments that make these works stranger than their titles first suggest.
A Supplement to the Journey to the West
Dong Yue
The New Republic
W. H. Mallock
The Myth of the Birth of the Hero
Otto Rank
Research notes
All notesThe 1909 and 1922 Editions of Otto Rank’s Hero Myth
What changed between Otto Rank's 1909 and substantially expanded 1922 editions of The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, and why the difference matters.
Read research noteAlfred Nutt Before Otto Rank: The Prehistory of the Hero Pattern
How Alfred Nutt's 1881 expulsion-and-return study and Johann Georg von Hahn's earlier formula anticipate the hero pattern later associated with Otto Rank.
Read research noteWhere Xiyou bu Fits Into Journey to the West
Where the 1641 Xiyou bu fits into Journey to the West, why it begins after the Mountain of Fire, and how its Qing Fish dream transforms Sun Wukong's pilgrimage.
Read research noteWho Is Who in W. H. Mallock’s The New Republic?
A guide to the Victorian intellectuals behind W. H. Mallock's 1877 roman à clef The New Republic, including Pater, Arnold, Ruskin, Jowett, and scientific naturalists.
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