Literature of the Americas Literature of the Americas 2541-7894 2542-243X IWL RAS Articles “Who Invents Rituals?”: Ralph Ellison Reads Lord Raglan 2018 Copyright © 2026, IWL RAS 2026 Discussions of myth and ritual in Ralph Ellison’s work typically reference the Cambridge Ritualists as a whole, but focus specific attention on Lord Raglan’s book The Hero. As scholars of Ellison and of American literature well know, for decades after its publication Ellison invoked Raglan when telling the origin story of his famous, award-winning novel, Invisible Man. Yet, I suggest that the tale of Ralph Ellison’s appropriation of the Cambridge Ritualists and their work is one that has only partially been told. Although literary critics have long accepted Ellison’s articulation of Raglan’s text to his novel’s opening, archival evidence suggests that this account of Invisible Man’s birth may be more retrospective sensemaking than historical fact. In this essay—part of a book-length project on the Ritualists’ influence on Ellison’s fiction and nonfiction—I therefore raise anew the question of Ellison’s engagement with Lord Raglan. Rather than simply adopting Ellison’s oft-repeated “myth of origin,” this essay uses archival materials to craft a more nuanced portrait of Ellison’s reading of The Hero. Through examination of Ellison’s personal copy of Raglan’s book, I trace four central arguments that Ellison appears to have gained from it—only one of which involves the familiar archetypal hero. I contend that this project allows us to more carefully illuminate the book’s importance in Ellison’s thinking on the nature of ritual—and to indicate points where he both drew and departed from it in order to stake out his position on American culture and literature. 1. Ackerman, Robert. The Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists. New York: Routledge, 1991. 2. Carson, David L. “Ralph Ellison: Twenty Years After,” in Graham, Maryemma and Singh, Amritjit, eds. Conversations with Ralph Ellison. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. 3. Crable, Bryan. Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke: At the Roots of the Racial Divide. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012. 4. Ellison, Ralph. Letter to Stanley Edgar Hyman. 22 June 1956. Box 6, Folder 30. Stanley Edgar Hyman Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 5. Ellison, Ralph; Callahan, John F., ed. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. New York: Modern Library, 1995. 6. Foley, Barbara. Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 7. Germana, Michael. Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 8. Gill, Brendan. Here at The New Yorker. New York: Random House, 1975. 9. Hyman, Stanley Edgar. The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism [1948]. New York: Vintage Books, 1955. 10. Hyman, Stanley Edgar. “Myth, Ritual, and Nonsense.” The Kenyon Review 11 (Summer 1949): 455-475. 11. Hyman, Stanley Edgar. “The Ritual View of Myth and the Mythic.” The Journal of American Folklore 68 (Oct./Dec. 1955): 462-472. 12. Hyman, Stanley Edgar. “Some Bankrupt Treasuries.” The Kenyon Review 10 (Summer 1948): 484-500. 13. Hyman, Stanley Edgar. The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as Imaginative Writers. New York: Atheneum, 1962. 14. 15. Parrish, Timothy. Ralph Ellison and the Genius of America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012. 16. 17. Rampersad, Arnold. Ralph Ellison: A Biography. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2007. 18. Rankine, Patrice D. Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.