In attempting to understand the place of rewriting myth in twentieth-century Mexican literature and its precise relationship to modernity, this chapter suggests five categories (aggrandisement, inhabitation, reversal, manipulation, and appropriation) as a tentative means of delineating the range of retellings involved. Figures such as Alfonso Reyes are invoked to attempt to understand (but also problematize) how such a set of soft categories might help us to understand the relationship between modernity, modernism and the re-writing of myth in the literary history of Mexico. The essay ends, however, with a reminder of the limitations of such categories against a background of overwhelmingly specific and idiosyncratic literary developments.