Sir James George Frazer O.M. was a classicist and social anthropologist whose theories concerning cultural and religious evolution were widely disseminated through the literature of the twentieth century. Partly as a result of his own stylistic and narrative gifts, he impressed powerful—though often mistaken—ideas about sacrifice, magic and ritual on several generations of writers, scholars and artists. Sigmund Freud, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats and the Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo were among the authors to be affected by him in different ways, and to varying degrees of intensity. Frazer's hypotheses about the death of kings, the regeneration of nature and the social impact of taboos, though largely rejected by later anthro

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First published 12 January 2001

Citation: Fraser, Robert. "Sir James Frazer". The Literary Encyclopedia. 12 January 2001.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1623, accessed 20 November 2009.]