The word ‘myth’ inhabits a twilight zone between literature, philosophy and anthropology. It means both a supremely significant foundational story and a falsehood. We therefore use it relationally; one person's belief is another's myth. But, much as Freud argued that the word Unheimlich (uncanny) combines the ‘hidden’ and the ‘familiar’, the word ‘myth’ superimposes two meanings to reflect a cardinal recognition implicit in the modern literary use of myth. Stated as a proposition, this is simply the fact that fully conscious citizens of the twentieth century are aware that their deepest commitments and beliefs are part of a world view, whether individual or collective, which cannot be transcendentally grounded or privileged over other possible world views. The interest lies not in the proposition itself, but in how it is lived, individually and collectively. Taken separately, the awareness of differing world views, on the one hand, and the question of belief or evaluative commitment on the other, are familiar and comprehensible, whatever internal difficulties they may each present. My concern is with their combination, which came to a crucial point of awareness in the modernist decades, roughly 1910 to 1930, and was reflected in the formal modes of modern literature. This has implications for the present, but it is necessary to revisit the early decades of the century when these questions were given a decisively influential, but still misappreciated, formulation.