The basic strategy is to illuminate the historic background to shed light on some aspect of the work. They also aim at revealing and correcting social injustice. This approach is concerned with content and values. The concern is not only to discover meaning but also to determine whether works are both true and significant. They use myths as a strategy for understanding how human beings try to account for their lives symbolically.
Myths help people organize their experiences and embody a culture's assumptions and values.
What is important is not the validity or truth of those assumptions but what they reveal about common human concerns. Mythological critics look for underlying, recurrent patterns that reveal universal meanings and basic human experiences. The character, images and themes that symbolically embody these meanings and experiences are called archetypes. Among the most common are quests, initiations, scapegoats, meditative withdrawals, descents to the underworld and heavenly ascents. This approach encourages the analysis of variations on the same theme.