[alexgooch]

Many thanks for this Stephen, this is very helpful indeed. I’ll check out the journals you suggest, but if and when I approach them, I’ll do so duly forewarned that the Jungian ‘hero’s journey’ might not exactly correspond to the Campbellian version.

You asked about the genesis of the paper. I’m a teacher of academic writing in the UK equivalent of a university ‘writing center’, and so spend a lot of my working life analysing the structures of essays and academic texts, and figuring out how to explain them to students. However, years ago I was taught Campbell on a Masters programme by one of the very few UK academics to take him seriously (a Jungian called Leon Schlamm, now sadly passed on to the great seminar room in the sky). So for a long time I’ve had The Hero with a Thousand Faces present in the back of my mind… but then one afternoon last year I had a eureka moment and suddenly noticed how the essay structure I’ve been teaching year-in-year-out maps really quite precisely onto Campbell’s heroic narrative structure (a good essay has the same tripartite structure, it has a call to adventure, it often has mentors, it requires confrontation with the ‘adversary’ in its strongest form, etc etc.).

I gave a paper on this at a conference for academic writing teachers, and got a relatively positive response (I suspect most of my colleagues aren’t sufficiently aware of Campbell to know that he’s persona non grata in academic circles), but so far none of the learned journals in my area have been willing to publish – hence the thought that maybe journals in other disciplines might be worth a try.

Anyway, thanks again for making enquiries Stephen, very much appreciated.

Best,

Alex