Beginnings

Focusing on the recent critical debate on origins in general, this essay reviews the book Myths of Origins: Literary and Cultural Patterns (2024), edited by Emilia di Rocco and Chiara Lombardi, and underlines the manifold, extended impact of myths of origins as patterns of literary creation. Through a diachronic investigation of recurrent models of “beginnings” in philosophical and literary traditions, following the book’s structure and contributions, this essay tries to highlight the performative and metanarrative import implied in the artistic mimesis of origins, which, through the literary act, seems to produce metahistorical potentialities for renewal and re-creation.