Mythologies

First published in France in 1957, Roland Barthes’s Mythologies is a brilliant investigation into the hidden meanings of everyday life. In a series of short, incisive essays, Barthes turns his attention to the seemingly ordinary details of post-war French culture: wrestling matches, steak and chips, children’s toys, advertisements, striptease and the sleek new Citroën DS. Beneath these familiar objects and rituals, he discovers a network of cultural assumptions through which bourgeois values present themselves as natural, universal and beyond question. What appears trivial becomes revealing, as Barthes shows how images, objects and popular entertainments quietly shape the way a society understands itself.

Combining the curiosity of a literary critic with the precision of a cultural detective, Barthes develops a way of reading the world that would profoundly influence semiotics, structuralism and modern cultural criticism. The collection concludes with “Myth Today”, a theoretical essay explaining how myth transforms history into something that seems inevitable, disguising ideology as common sense. Yet the book is never merely abstract: its intelligence lies in the pleasure of looking again at what familiarity has taught us to overlook. More than six decades after its publication, Mythologies remains an indispensable guide to the strange eloquence of everyday things, and a foundational work for anyone interested in the relationship between language, power and popular culture.

From the book

“I resented seeing Nature and History confused at every turn, and I wanted to track down, in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying, the ideological abuse which, in my view, is hidden there.”

— Roland Barthes, Mythologies

On Mythologies

“It’s remarkable that essays written more than a half-century ago, on another continent, should seem not merely pertinent but prescient in regard to the course of contemporary American culture.”

— Kirkus Reviews