In the following essay excerpt, Manganaro "adopts current textual approaches to anthropology in an effort to understand the rhetorical power behind Frazer's masterwork."

For well over half a century literary audiences have listened to modern artists and critics speak of Frazer's literariness and its salutary effects upon Modern art and criticism; Eliot found Frazer's literary "vision" and style an essential component of the emerging Modernist temperament, and by the early sixties Frye and Hyman brought to a culmination the literary usefulness of Frazer's graceful text for myth and ritual studies. Typical of interdisciplinary relations, however, was the lag between social scientific production and aesthetic appreciation and appropriation: Eliot's plaudits for Frazer in 1922 (in his Notes to The Waste Land as well as the famous review of Joyce's Ulysses) coincided with the publication of Bronislaw Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific, a model for the emerging functionalist monograph...