Ricorso and Revelation is the only book on Modernism to explore in detail the impact of archaeological digs in Crete and Mycenae, Mesopotamia, and Egypt by Sir Arthur Evans, Sir Leonard Wooley, and Howard Carter. It shows how the discoveries of the Palace of Knossos, the Royal Cemetery of Ur, and the Tomb of Tutankhamen, along with the artifacts recovered from those sites, entered the mythic imagery and narrative strategies of Modernism.

Ricorso and Revelation also develops a new theory about the linkage among four mythic configurations of central importance to the literature of European Modernism produced between the years 1895 and 1946. It examines the myths of the maze, alchemy, the Great Goddess, and the Apocalypse in a wide range of works by such authors as Hermann Broch, Nikos Kazantzakis, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, D.H.

Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, and Robert Frost, as well as in the paintings of Pablo Picasso and the films of Jean Cocteau.

Drawing from a variety of theories about myth, Smith shows how the Modernists developed an elaborate vocabulary of form to develop their key insight: that each of the four myths represents a creative return to origins (ricorso), a reduction of the raw materials of daily life to the fundamental elements of creation (revelation), followed by a re-creation of the world (cosmogenesis), of the poet (ontogenesis), and of the text (poesis).