Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays

by Northrop Frye

“...simply overpowering in the originality of its main concepts, and dazzling in the brilliance of its applications of them. Here is a book fundamental enough to be entitled Principia Critica.” —Vivian Mercier, Commonweal

“...an attempt to give ‘a synoptic view of the scope, theory, principles, and techniques of literary criticism,’ ... the book is continuously informed by original and incisive thought, by fine perception, and by striking observations upon literature in general and upon particular works.” —Modern Language Review

“Does literary criticism need a conceptual universe of its own? Professor Frye has written a brilliantly suggestive and encyclopaedically erudite book to prove that it does; and he has done his impressive best to provide a framework for this universe. His book is a signal achievement; it is tight, hard paradoxical, and genuinely witty ... [Professor Frye] is the most exciting critic around; I do not think he is capable of writing a page which does not offer some sort of intellectual reward.” —Robert Martin Adams, Hudson Review

“This is a brilliant but bristling book, an important though thoroughly controversial attempt to establish order in a disorderly field ... Mr. Frye has wit, style, audacity, immense learning, a gift for opening up new and unexpected perspectives in the study of literature ... It would be hopeless to attempt a brief summary of Mr. Frye’s dazzlingly counterpointed classifications.” —Thomas Vance, The Nation

Cover design by Andy Jurinko

Genres: Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Criticism, Philosophy, Essays, Literature, Theory

383 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1957

About the author

Born in Quebec but raised in New Brunswick, Frye studied at the University of Toronto and Victoria University. He was ordained to the ministry of the United Church of Canada and studied at Oxford before returning to UofT.

His first book, Fearful Symmetry, was published in 1947 to international acclaim. Until then, the prophetic poetry of William Blake had long been poorly understood, considered by some to be delusional ramblings. Frye found in it a system of metaphor derived from Paradise Lost and the Bible. His study of Blake's poetry was a major contribution. Moreover, Frye outlined an innovative manner of studying literature that was to deeply influence the study of literature in general. He was a major influence on, among others, Harold Bloom and Margaret Atwood.

In 1974-1975 Frye was the Norton professor at Harvard University.

Frye married Helen Kemp, an educator, editor and artist, in 1937. She died in Australia while accompanying Frye on a lecture tour. Two years after her death in 1986 he married Elizabeth Brown. He died in 1991 and was interred in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto, Ontario. The Northrop Frye Centre at Victoria College at the University of Toronto was named in his honour.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop...

Reviews

[Riku Sayuj · Rating 5 out of 5]

Except for the comically inadequate introduction by Harold Bloom, this book is a window to a whole new way of seeing the literary universe. In scope and depth, it is an epic and no matter how cynically you approach it, Frye is going to awe you with sheer erudition and immaculate schematics. For anyone with a Platonic bent, Frye's work has the potential to become an immediate Bible.

It might take a while to get through and it might require you to convert a lot of Frye's work into shorter notes and diagrammatic notations, just to keep up with the density of the text, but at the end of it you will be exposed to an almost cosmic vision of Literature, comparable to that at the end of Paradiso.

It is worth the effort just for the sheer ambition of the work and for the bit of that ambition that will rub off on you, even if you reject everything else contained here.

Only Joyce might be able to teach you about the scope of literature in a more inspiring fashion than this poet-critic.

[Peiman E iran · Rating 3 out of 5]

‎دوستانِ گرانقدر، نویسندهٔ این کتاب جناب <نورتروپ فرای> از همان ابتدایِ بحث در کتاب، منتقدانِ ادبی را به دو گروه تقسیم میکند، یکی منتقدِ عمومی و دیگری منتقدِ دانشمند
‎منتقدِ دانشمند کسی است که آثار ادبی را تحلیل کرده و به پژوهش پرداخته و آن را به صورت کتاب و یا مقاله ای جامع، ارائه میدهد... این گروه از منتقدان کسانی هستند که دانشی در خصوصِ انواع سبکِ ادبی و تاریخِ ادبیات دارند و کارشان باید در راستای دانش و به خصوص دانشِ روز باشد و صد البته هیجاناتِ جامعه و رویدادهای پیش آمده نباید در نوشتار و نقد آنها تأثیر داشته باشد.. به عنوانِ مثال، منتقدی که غزل حافظ را به تحلیل مینشاند، نباید مصلحت های دینی و مذهبی را وارد نقد و پژوهش خویش نموده و در زندگی و حتی تفسیر اشعار حافظ تحریف ایجاد کرده و برای مثال حافظ را که مهرپرست و میترا پرستی اندیشمند و خردمند بوده را مسلمانی معتقد و حافظ قرآن بداند که این دور از خرد و دانش است و یا شراب را شراب الهی و این خزعبلات و موهومات معنا کند و یا سخن از عشق زمینی را به عشق آسمانی که بسیار بی معناست ربط دهد... منتقد دانشمند کاری به مجله و رسانه های صوتی و تصویری و اینترنت ندارد، بلکه ایده و نظرات و نقد و نتیجهٔ پژوهش های خود را در کتاب به مخاطبان ارائه میکند، این کتاب یا میتواند حاصل پژوهش هایش باشد و یا میتواند ترجمه ای از آنچه به زبانهای دیگر خوانده است باشد... با احترام به منتقدانی که در ایران هستند، ما در ایران منتقدِ دانشمند نداریم.. ولی از منتقدین دانشمند مشهور میتوانیم از باختین و یا هارولد بلوم و یا نویسندهٔ این کتاب یعنی نورتروپ فرای، نام ببریم
‎و امّا منتقد عمومی، همانطور که از عنوانش پیداست، منتقدی است که با نقدِ خویش به افکارِ عمومی سمت و سو میدهد و حتی نقد وی از افکارِ عمومی شکل میگیرد... معمولاً به یک اثر ادبی امتیاز میدهد و یا به دیگران پیشنهادِ خواندن و یا دیدنِ فلان اثر هنری و یا خریداری فلان کتاب را میدهد.... یک منتقد عمومی باید بی طرف باشد تا جامعه به او اعتماد کرده و نقدش را بپذیرند... درکل کار ارزش گذاری بر یک یا چند اثرِ ادبی، بر عهدهٔ منتقد عمومی میباشد.. منتقدانی که نقدشان بی ارزش تلقی میشود، منتقدانی هستند که اعتقادات دینی و مذهبی و حتی تعصبات و سمت و سوهایِ سیاسیِ خود را واردِ نقد خویش میکنند، که این نقدِ بی ارزش همچون انگل و ویروسی خطرناک به مغزِ مخاطب نفوذ میکند... پس عزیزانم، از خواندنِ نقدهایی که در آنها اعتقاد به فلان مذهب و تبلیغ فلان پیامبر و به اصطلاح امام و تبلیغ فلان حزب و گروه سیاسی وارد شده است، شدیداً پرهیز کنید و زمان ارزشمندِ خویش را هدر نکنید، چراکه امتیاز و نقدی که صورت گرفته از عقاید و به اصطلاح فشارهایِ غیرهنری سرچشمه گرفته است و نویسندهٔ آن موجودی متعصب و بیخرد و حتی موهوم گرا بوده است
--------------------------------------------
‎امیدوارم این ریویو برای شما خردگرایانِ گرامی، مفید بوده باشه
‎<پیروز باشید و ایرانی>

[Kristi Siegel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Luckless undergraduate standing in front of Northrop Frye’s An Anatomy of Criticism…

I vividly remember my reaction, when as an undergraduate, I read Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism as a required text in a course I was taking. The book begins innocently enough; in his “Polemical Introduction,” Frye discusses the critic’s role and the current gaps in literary theory (which, of course, he intends to fill). With the first essay, though, however, Frye begins to launch his system.

I recall feeling engulfed as Frye trotted out one network of schematization after another: modes, symbols, myths, genres, accompanied by an endless march of terminology: high mimetic, low mimetic, phases, mythoi, alazons, sparagmos, anagogical, pharmakos, agon, eiron, etc., etc. The more he explained—backed by an encyclopedic array of allusions from the Bible as well as every period of literature imaginable—the smaller I felt.

…In a (very) old movie called The Incredible Shrinking Man, the main character—as could be anticipated—becomes progressively smaller. During an early scene—he’s on his second date with a beautiful woman—she wounds him by remarking, brilliantly, “Didn’t you used to be taller?” [The film, now that I think about it, may be the ultimate male nightmare.:] This poor guy has one disaster after another until he is being chased around a basement by a cat whose size is now monstrous compared to him. In the final scene, he has somehow crawled onto a window sill and stands in front of the screen looming before him. He inevitably shrinks again, passes right through one of the grids and disappears. I think the first time I read Frye I felt like the shrinking man standing before the giant grid.

I have some qualms about Frye’s literary schemata. To buy his theory, we have to agree that literature is based on myth. Also, problems arise in any fixed system of literary classification. Looking at Frye’s terminology for character, for instance, I find it reductive to categorize Tess D’Urberville as a pharmakos or Moll Flanders as a picaro.

Frye, of course, does not maintain that a character is limited to one category. However, even using a fusion of his categories for classifying a protagonist may leave large gaps. I tend to agree with Frank Kermode’s critique of Frye’s literary grid: “[it is the:] breath of Hermione, the presence of Perdite, that are lost to view as you stand back; you sacrifice them to a system and a myth.”

And yet, despite that bit of bitching, Frye’s book is one of those that peeps out now and then as I'm reading. Its influence remains.

Frye argues, for example, that there are five heroic modes: mythic, romantic, high mimetic, low mimetic, and irony; these five modes being applicable to either tragedy or comedy.

In Frye's schematization, the hero's scope is fairly circumscribed, falling into one of the latter two modes: low mimetic fiction or ironic fiction. The novel, a relatively recent form, a point Frye makes crystal clear in his later essay, "Specific Continuous Forms," presents a hero far removed from myth and romance. For Frye, the hero of a novel is "superior neither to other men nor to his environment...[s/he's:] one of us" (low mimetic) or, in the ironic mode, "inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves, so that we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity" (34).

To counter the increasing return to myth in modern fiction, Frye points out that his five modes are circular: "Irony descends from the low mimetic; it begins in realism and dispassionate observation. But as it does so, it moves steadily toward myth, and dim outlines of sacrificial rituals and dying gods begin to reappear in it" (42). After adding Frye's notions of symbol, myth and its corresponding imagery for each of the five modes, the complexity of the book begins to emerge.

...If you can get past the sense of being dwarfed, it's a worthwhile read.

[Mohammad Ranjbari · Rating 5 out of 5]

برای منتقد، عملِ نقد کردن سخت است. به ویژه در جوامعی که در آن، نقد از جایگاه مطلوبی برخوردار نیست، منتقد بودن و نقد کردن به نوعی کاستن از اعتبار است! ادبیات هر کشور منتقدان زبده و در اصطلاح عام، نترسی دارند که با نقد اصولی، از عهدۀ برخی کژتابی‌ها و تعابیر نادرست در بین چهره‌های ادبی آن کشور برآیند. نورتروپ فرای کل ادبیات غرب را حدود مایملک نقدِ خویش قرار داده و در این کتاب توانسته با ترسیم و برقراری چهارچوبی درست، از بسیاری ژانرهای کلاسیک که روز به روز بر تعاریف نامرتبط آن افزوده می‌شود، ابهام‌زدایی کند. مباحثی چون ادبیات و نمایش‌های دراماتیک و تراژیک، رمانس و کمدی و هزل، مایۀ کار نقد ادبی فرای در این کتاب است. او گاه با توجه به جهان‌بینی کلاسیک در حوزۀ نظریۀ ژانرها، که هر ژانری مطابق با یکی از فصول چهارگانه بود به توضیح می‌پردازد و گاه با تعریف و ترسیم مجدد جریان‌ها وقوالب و ژانرهای ادبی در مباحث ورود می‌نماید.
قاعدتاً اولین بحث در این کتاب، بازشناخت نقد ادبی و ماهیت آن است که فرای نبوغِ سراسر خیره کنندۀ خویش را در اولین مقالۀ این کتاب، یعنی «مقدمۀ جدلی» به مخاطب نشان می‌دهد. وی با کوتاه‌ترین و مختصرترین تعاریف شخصی ماهیت شعر و هنر و شاعر و ... را مشخص می‌کند. به عنوان نمونه:

«اساس نقد نباید بر این باشد که شاعر نمی‌داند دربارۀ چه چیز سخن می‌گوید، بلکه باید بر این اساس استوار باشد که شاعر نمی‌تواند دربارۀ چیزی که می‌داند سخن بگوید. بنابرین لازمۀ دفاع از حق حیات نقد پذیرفتن این فرض است که نقد عبارت است از نوعی ساختار اندیشه و معرفت قائم به ذات، و از هنری که با آن سر و کار دارد تا اندازه‌ای مستقل است.» ص 17

مباحث دیگر کتاب به دو شاخۀ مهمِ ملهم از نگرش ادبی کلاسیک تقسیم می‌شود. اولی نقد اخلاقی‌ست که فرای آن را در نظامِ اسطوره‌‌ای توسع یافته‌ای بررسی می‌کند. البته این بحث از جانب اسطوره‌گرا و اخلاق‌مدار بودن کلاسیک است ولی از سوی دیگر با توجه به اینکه به نقد روانکاوانه و بررسی کهن‌الگوهای ادبیات می‌پردازد، بحث جدیدی محسوب می‌شود. به نظر من چنین بحثی بسیار به نقد ادبی غرب کمک کرده است. زیرا منتقد می‌تواند در این چهارچوبِ مشخص شده، تمامی عناصر ساختاری و مضمونی شعر و در کل هنر را بررسی کند. هم با در نظر گرفتن ریشه‌شناسی و هم تحلیل روانکاونه و حتی رویکردهای مختلف نقد ادبی. مبحث بعدی به نظریۀ بلاغت اشاره دارد که فرای با نمونه دادن از اشعار مختلف، مهم‌ترین مباحثی را که منجر به تعالی رتوریکی و بلاغی اثر شود، برای خوانندگان بسط و ایضاح می‌کند.
به سطرهای اول این نوشته اشاره می‌کنم و جسارت و نبوغ شخصیتی چون فرای که این‌چنین در کالبدِ ادبیات نفوذ کرده و در یک دست چراغ قوّه، برای نشان دادن ابهامات و در دست دیگر آچار، برای تعمیر کاستی‌ها و معایب، وارد میدان نقد و انتقاد می‌شود.

99/01/14

[sologdin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A superior display of erudition.

Sets out its task in terms reminiscent of Kant's assertion that "philosophy stands in need of a science" in the Critique of Pure Reason: "If criticism exists, it must be an examination of literature in terms of a conceptual framework derivable from an inductive survey of the literary field. The word 'inductive' suggests some sort of scientific procedure. What if criticism is a science as well as an art?" (7). Both Kant and Frye strike me as latter day Miltons, who, within their respective fields, desire to assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men.

Frye is of course much more humble about it than Milton (but who isn't?), and, in addressing his miltonic-kantian task, offers this volume as a mere attempt to annotate T.S. Eliot's ideas (18) (which ideas I regard as thoroughly reactionary and dullard). Frye is more lively than that, though, even as he sets out neo-aristotelian schematics, neo-spenglerian distinctions, neo-arnoldian pseudo-sociology. As with Toynbee or Delbruck, Frye's panoramic reading makes plausible associations across time and space, dispelling problems about which I'd been thinking for years in a sentence. That's not to say that he possesses the answer (it's literary theory, after all)--but that he has an answer.

Much like "42," though, sometimes answers arrive without any question requiring their presence. This volume arrives during the height of the New Criticism, and marks out several departures therefrom, including some arriere garde dangers. But it is nevertheless a study of formalism.

We see both departure and danger in one representative passage: "The verbal action of Figaro is comic and that of Don Giovanni tragic; but in both cases the audience is exalted by the music above the reach of tragedy and comedy, and, though as profoundly moved as ever, is not emotionally involved with the discovery of plot or characters" (289). This bit departs from New Criticism by delving into the "affective fallacy," but it's not reception theory proper, as it reduces audience response to the formal categories of the text, rather than carrying out a materialist's inductive survey of actual reception. The latter is laborious, surely--whereas formalist heretic Frye is content to read the form of the operas and decide what an audience should do with it.

Thickest citation block in the index is Shakespeare, naturally, followed by other predictables: Milton, Chaucer, Joyce. His commentary on individual texts is usually very impressive, such as classifying Shakespearean plays and whatnot. An example: the text lays out a tidy scheme for prose fiction--the novel is extroverted and personal; the romance, introverted and personal; the confession, introverted and intellectual; the menippean satire, extroverted and intellectual (308). Texts can partake of any of these prose fiction genres simultaneously--and therefore the genius of Joyce's Ulysses (and I agree) is that it registers on all four in a unified manner (313-14). Slick, surely.

But the slickest bit is self-referential. Noting that "menippean satire" is unwieldy and misleading as a designation, Frye adopts the term anatomy, eponymous of Burton (311). The anatomy as genre is marked out "by piling up an enormous mass of erudition" and "in overwhelming pedantic targets with an avalanche of their own jargon" (id.). Its object is "mental attitudes" such as "pedants, bigots, cranks, perverts, virtuosi, enthusiasts, rapacious and incompetent professional men" (309). There's much more to be said in platonist definition, but wittgensteinian examples sometimes work better: Lucian, Erasmus, Rabelais, Swift, Apuleius, Petronius, Voltaire, Burton, Joyce are practitioners; best known works of the genre: Moby Dick, Tristram Shandy, Don Quixote, Brave New World. Even Boethius is considered in this connection. (I'd add that the subtitle of Kraken should get us to think of Mieville seriously in terms of menippean satire.)

With reference to this text's own title, we can only conclude that it signifies as assertive, persuasive rhetoric regarding a non-literary purpose, as laid out in the statement of authorial purpose, supra. Frye then notes that allegedly "non-literary prose" might be read in a literary way by criticism (326 ff.). This means that Frye's non-fictional anatomy should be read also as an anatomy in the tradition of Lucian and Sterne. It's a big satirical fuck you! to the literary theory establishment as well as a love letter to same.

Recommended.

[Gorkem · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frye, 20.yüzyılın en önemli edebiyat eleştirmenlerden biri şüphesiz.Özellikle mit eleştirisi, kahramanın yolculuğununa bakışı- arketipler eleştirisi teorileri edebiyat eleştirisine ciddi yön kazandırmış ve aynı zamanda edebiyat eleştirisinin sadece akademik veya belirli bir grup tarafından yapılmasına karşı duruşu, bu alanın geniş bir topluluğa yayılmasını sağlamıştır.

Frye eleştiriye edebiyatın ne olduğunu tartışarak modül ilerlemeler içinde başlıyor. Bir edebiyat eserini okunur ve sanat eseri değerli kılan başlıklar tarihsel ve antropolojik oluşum içinde şiirsel metinlerle birlikte inceliyor. Bundan sonra kendi oluşturduğu Edebiyat Modları Teorisini 4 makale/deneme içinde inceliyor:

a. İlk Deneme: Kipler Teorisi:
b.İkinci Deneme: Sembol Teorisi
c. Arketipik Eleştiri: Mit Teorisi
d.Retorik Eleştirisi: Tür Teorisi

Her deneme bağımsız olarak okunabileceği gibi sırasıyla okunabilecek akıcılıkta.

Kitap benim açımda çok zihin açıcı oldu. Okuduğum metinlerde hep kafamı kurcalayan soruların cevabını bulduğumu belirtmeliyim. Fakat, şiir analizine bazen aşırı denecek fazla yönelmesi, söz geçen metinlerin çevirisi olmadığından ya da olanları okumadığımdan yazarın belirtmiş olduğu bağlamları kavramam konusunda hava kalma hissini doğal olarak yarattı. Her şeye rağmen son 2 deneme, gerçekten edebi okumaların incelenmesi konusunda çok güzel bir başlangıç seviyesi oluşturdu benim adıma.

İlgi duyanlara iyi okumalar dilerim.

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, this is pretty dense in a way that books usually aren't these days. Not dense in a Frenchified theory way, and not dense in a flowery language kind of way. Just conceptually dense. Which is fine, but not all of the concepts are useful. Density aside, the first two essays - on historical criticism and 'symbols,' (which for Frye doesn't really mean, well, symbol) - are pretty good, if overly schematic. The third essay is horrific. Really, you just need a diagram for it, but we get over 100 pages instead. The fourth essay, on genres, is occasionally interesting but also too schematic and way too long. I'd stick to the introduction and first two essays, and skim the rest.

One thing that's odd is that people say this seems 'dated' thanks to Marxist or feminist or postcolonial theory, or deconstruction. Not really, though. Frye's aware of all those trends already in 1957 (not counting postco, I guess); and his work isn't dated by deconstruction. It's just the opposite side, handily summarised in Harold Bloom's (awful) foreword: for Bloom and his ilk, literature is all about indeterminacy, and more or less a brawl among self-loathing geniuses. For Frye, literature is a "cooperative enterprise," part of the attempt to make life better for ourselves. Not dated, then, but one side of an ongoing argument. Frankly, I hope Frye's side wins. Then there'll be no need to re-read this book.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although Frye's traditional approach to the criticism of literary texts seems dated now, particularly from the perspective of recent literary theory (feminist criticism, Marxist criticism, post-structuralism, etc.), this text is an impressive attempt at systematizing Western literature according to genres, myths, symbols and modes.

Acquired 1986
The Word, Montreal, Quebec

[John Pistelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I had to choose one book as the foundation for an education in literary criticism and theory, I might choose Anatomy of Criticism; I wish I had read it much earlier. Even if one’s goal were the deconstruction, to various ends or just for the hell of it, of the concept of literature, this might be the most productive text to deconstruct, because Frye construes his theory as the climax and (to use his typological Biblical language) fulfillment of all prior western literary theory from Aristotle to Eliot.

In his “Polemical Introduction,” Frye rejects prevailing ways of defining the critical project. The goal of criticism, he says, should not be canon-making or politicking, but rather a properly elaborated science of the whole body of literature:

Criticism, rather, is to art what history is to action and philosophy to wisdom: a verbal imitation of a human productive power which in itself does not speak. And just as there is nothing which the philosopher cannot consider philosophically, and nothing which the historian cannot consider historically, so the critic should be able to construct and dwell in a conceptual universe of his own.

This may sound like an arid scientistic or New Critical project, severing literature from life, but, as the end of the book makes clear, it is just the opposite: since criticism addresses itself primarily to rhetoric, and since no concept or emotion can be expressed without rhetoric, criticism in fact addresses itself to everything human. In this, and in his refusal to adjudicate questions of literary quality (which he dismisses as mere “taste,” hence social prejudice), Frye’s seemingly old-fashioned book leads more or less directly to some variant (a non-Marxist one) of cultural studies and multiculturalism.

But if Anatomy of Criticism is known for anything these days, it as a compendium of quasi-Jungian mythical or archetypal theories of literature. Frye argues that the four central types of criticism—the historical, the ethical, the archetypal, and the generic—examine different aspects of literature that can nevertheless be reconstructed by the theorist as a unity. This unity is ultimately based upon categorial human mythoi that refer to the life-cycles of individuals, societies, and the human race. Just as Shelley claimed that every language is “the chaos of a cyclic poem,” so Frye argues that literature in its diversity is made up of primordial images and narratives. For criticism to be a science, Frye believes, it must have an ultimate end in sight, and the ultimate end is literature-in-its-totality’s vision of the human archetypes on their progress through the natural rotation:

The structural principles of literature…are to be derived from archetypal and anagogic criticism, the only kind that assumes a larger context, of literature as a whole. […] Hence the structural principles of literature are as closely related to mythology and comparative religion as those of painting are to geometry. In this essay [on myths] we shall be using the symbolism of the Bible, and to a lesser extent Classical mythology, as a grammar of literary archetypes.

These mythoi, to each of which Frye assigns a season, move in a pattern from birth to death to rebirth and they are narrated in their entirety in The Bible, which Frye construes as a total myth. My brief review, even with selective quotation, cannot really reproduce the psychedelic quality of Frye’s pages on these topics, and I would have to read the book again to be able to account precisely for how the mythoi interrelate across modes and genres. As Frye traces how myth and mode interact, how each literary work and genre can be seen as one element in a total process, his book gives the pleasure of a narrative in which a maddening and chaotic mystery suddenly becomes clear:

The four mythoi that we are dealing with, comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony, may now be seen as four aspects of a central unifying myth. Agon or conflict is the basis or archetypal theme of romance, the radical of romance being a sequence of marvellous adventures. Pathos or catastrophe, whether in triumph or in defeat, is the archetypal theme of tragedy. Sparagmos, or the sense that heroism and effective action are absent, disorganized or foredoomed to defeat, and that confusion and anarchy reign over the world, is the archetypal theme of irony and satire. Anagnorisis, or recognition of a newborn society rising in triumph around a still somewhat mysterious hero and bis bride, is the archetypal theme of comedy.

Most people today probably doubt that criticism can be a science in the way that Frye defines it, even though Frye was probably correct to think that literature would not be able to maintain its status in the modern university unless it could defend itself as a disinterested and autonomous contribution to Wissenschaft. But creative writers are happy to present themselves either as crazy people or craftspeople, and literary scholars have been cheerfully selling their birthright for every mess of pottage that has come their way, from structural linguistics to critical sociology to techno-utopianism. Having sawn off the branch they were sitting on (to vary my metaphor), literary scholars have little cause to complain, it seems to me, if they find themselves without support (why pay a literary critic to do imprecise sociology?). Even at that, though, Frye’s Jung- and Frazer-inspired “science” will strike even sympathetic readers as too New Agey to be a sober and scholarly account of a body of historical evidence, however entertaining certain sensibilities (I mean mine!) happen to find it, and however inspiring it is as an attempt to make good on Wilde’s program for criticism: to show “the unity of the human mind in the variety of its forms.”

Frye does envision an ultimate “ethical” or social mission for literature, as he reveals in Anatomy’s extraordinary “Tentative Conclusion.” There he defines the study of literature as a humanizing force that provides students with a repertoire of images for the just society that humanity will probably never attain but must always strive for. Readers of Fredric Jameson will recall the ease with which Jameson—playing Hegel to Frye’s Kant, as it were—was able to set Frye’s static archetypes into motion to appropriate his theory for Marxism. But Frye takes a hard line against Marxism, correctly observing that revolution and politics, by denying the autonomy that legitimates literature’s utopianism and by interfering with the freedom of writers and scholars to pursue their visions, actually curtails human development in the guise of pushing it forward. Frye, to be sure, is something of an optimist, and his ultimate view of our species’ progress seems to be something on the order of “Don’t push the river—it flows.” This will anger conservatives for its somewhat cavalier attitude toward tradition and it will anger radicals for its passivity; in short, Frye has constructed one of the most ingenious defenses of liberalism known to me. (I have posted a long quotation from Frye on this political theme over at my Tumblr to avoid lengthening this review: see here if you’re interested.)

Why read this book today if you aren’t convinced of its politics or its theoretical presuppositions? Joshua Rothman gives the best reason: Frye’s lucid exposition of literary genres and modes expands our vocabulary for talking about novels, poems, plays, films, and other imaginative forms. When Frye protests against labelling any work of prose narrative a “novel,” insisting on the contrary that there are in fact four genres of prose narrative—romance, novel, confession, anatomy—you can sense the literary universe get a bit bigger. In that sense, this might be the most affirmative book of literary criticism or theory I have ever read. Frye ultimately implies that knowledge and pleasure should be concomitant in the attention we pay to the arts. The more we understand about a work’s tradition, the more we will be able to value it for what it is rather than censuring it for what it is not: as Frye says, we should not judge a romance by the standards of the novel and vice versa.

(Though some might understand what I mean if I say I am bit disappointed that Rothman has to use this theory to explicate the middlebrow genre-inflected literary fiction of today, whereas Frye's own essay on genre climaxes in an attempt to explain the avant-garde achievements of Joyce: Frye praises Ulysses as a "complete prose epic" that contains all four prose genres in perfect balance, and he claims that Finnegans Wake goes further even than that to attain something like scriptural status.)

While some may think that Frye’s compendium of jargon and his intense schematism might neutralize literary appreciation by taking the passion out of it, it instead increases appreciation by imparting more and more language with which to express one’s knowledge about what one reads. I do believe, however, that it would be a disaster to try to create a great work by trying to conform to Frye’s categories: that would probably result in Joseph Campbell, Star Wars, and other such simplistic stuff that piles up cliches and calls them myths. Even if we accept Frye’s postulate that a critic must be a scientist, we can agree that it is the scientist’s business to account for nature, and not nature’s business to tailor and circumscribe itself for the benefit of the scientist.

In any case, I doubt this will be my only reading of this learned and mind-expanding book. I would advise every student of literature, professional or amateur, to read it sooner rather than later.

[Feliks · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is pretty dense material. You have to read each paragraph fairly slowly to make sure you grasp his point, or the next one to follow makes no sense. Reversing one's tracks and going-back-over a page is sometimes necessary. This treatise will leave you feeling pummeled and exhausted.

It doesn't start off well. The most difficult and also the most appetizing of targets (in his first two essays, 'Theory of Modes' and 'Theory of Symbols') are the shortest and the murkiest. In essay 1 & 2, 'familiar' references (such as mention of Shakespeare or Homer) are sorely in need--but they can hardly appear often enough as Frye hauls-you-on-his-back through a slough of sticky, mucky, literary quagmires. It feels like drowning in verbiage.

When he sets out on this journey, he's simply far too stingy with his examples. And (in terms of sheer style and readability) there's simply no humor, ease, refreshment, or pausing-for-breath. No stopping-by-the-wayside...much less a cozy-grate-by-the-fire on a winter's night. It's an 'airless' discussion. "Uncomfortable reading", even for me (and I read English literary-criticism quite a lot).

Worse, Frye seems to me to shirk from his main promise, which is to afford us all a new clarity. But there's only faint immanence to be found among anything he is stating; which I find a little irksome. Reading text this subtle and nuanced--anytime you look up from the page, yearning for a mile-marker or highway number...you should quickly be able to find one. In Frye, there's none. No roadmap, no outline, no structure, no taxonomy, no hierarchy, no scaffold, no anatomy.

Sure--in one essay--you might get a couple subheadings like, 'Symbol as Mediator' or 'Symbol as Reception' but this is not very helpful. These lurch up unexpectedly out of nowhere; and as soon as you come to one of these junctures, you simply plunge right over it back into a bottomless well of words.

At the start of each of these essays, Frye seems to follow this pattern: he will begin by taking up a historic or traditional definition or concept--hold it up to the light, turn it this-way-and-that. Then, he'll state how he might defend or attack it, based on some angle which he considers the stronger or weaker strategy for doing so.

But then, he goes on to rattle off example after example of 'obstacles' or 'exceptions' or 'fissures' in the methodology. At the end of the essay, all you have is a list of why things *won't* work; and you discover Frye has really traveled nowhere. You are not given a 'framework' (a term touted much on the cover's blurbs) for ever approaching the topic in future, on your own.

This is why I'm not thrilled with what he's done here. I mean come on--if you're going to give people a book of 'celebrated essays' which are supposed to enhance our understanding, supposed to enlighten us...then deliver your points clearly, make them as transparent as the dawn and as sharp-edged as crystal. Tell us why you're choosing to 'sift-for-gold' using one pan of water rather than the one next to it; tell us why you're choosing one creek vs the neighboring one right alongside. What's the rationale behind your approach?

Frye simply hands us long, chunky blocks of his thought..moving from one subject to the next --with no reason for his choices, ever explained. Instead of traversing from one 'tier' to the next, he rambles and ranges on at great, garrulous, length--talking about scads of stuff--- but never truly exposing any deep or hidden structure to it all. He never explains any new method via which to re-consider the 'history of written English'. He provides plenty of 're-definitions' but no new method of analysis. There's nothing which one can pick up from this book and walk away with. We're simply listening to a man 'talk himself out'.

These were my impressions for the first half of the publication. To be fair, things got somewhat better after that point. The second two essays in the book ('Theory of Myths', & 'Theory of Genres') are given more length and more lucidity. But, they're also the easier subject matter and the least in need of explication. Many other critics have handled them.

The strength of Frye's acumen does come through best in essay #3. I have to acknowledge this. It's a formidable performance. He hits his stride talking about myth; its the best section overall. I've rarely seen the milestones of western lit arrayed so neatly. Really (in just this one area) Frye surveys myth-based narrative better than even Joseph Campbell. Myth lovers, speed thee to essay #3.

Bottom line: I suppose I respect what he's done...I respect his obvious erudition..I just didn't enjoy the endproduct very much. Won't find very much 'utility' in it...but it is going to stay on my shelf for a while. There's too many factoids spilling out from between these two covers to just toss it. Anytime I need a quick 'handle' on Shakespeare, Voltaire, Swift, Jonson, Marlowe, or Moliere--this is where I'll come.

[Simon · Rating 1 out of 5]

OK, it's certainly silly to give this book such a low rating, but honestly, I found it bad. The Polemical Introduction was intriguing but left one wanting to know exactly what he thought the science of criticism would be like. The first essay, on modes, was a taxonomy by principles (the status of the hero relative to 'us') that didn't seem all that intuitive to me. And at the end, there seemed little beyond taxonomy. What this had to do with the goal of explaining the literary phenomena, which I thought, from the Introduction, was the goal, I don't know. Then, the second essay, began to deal with issues related to the philosophy of language: meaning, reference, etc. I found his treatment of these topics maddeningly jejune, confused and insensitive to distinctions. It made me so frustrated that I gave up reading at that point.

I wish someone would explain why I'm wrong, and what I'm missing.

[Bob R Bogle · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took a long time, but I finally finished reading Northrop Frye's 1957 classic, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, from cover to cover. It is, as Frye expressed in the opening paragraph, a work of "pure critical theory," practically and appropriately biblical and epic in style and structure. Because anyone reading this review is likely to already have a good notion of the content of the Anatomy or, in the case of students for whom it is assigned reading, who soon enough shall, I will not belabor that matter here; instead, I'll spend a few moments and words to try to locate the work in its proper celestial locus almost 60 years since its first publication.

The jargon-heavy Anatomy is a thick slab of critical theory marbled with little fat or garnish on the side. Frye approaches literature and its criticism as a physical universe unto itself, having some connection to the world we inhabit, but these connections are of little interest to him, or less. This all has to do with words and how they hook together, what kinds of patterns emerge from their concatenations, and what their attendant etymology is, and mythic allusions, as well as how cultures work and rework the old myths, always pressing their own stamp upon the myths and words, so the stories change even while they carry their most ancient meanings, or significations. Still, it is how we talk about stories or poems, or how we relate to them in the unfolding of time, that is of more concern to Frye, for criticism becomes for him something of a persisting cloud of dust raised upon the old roads of literature that is inseparable from the original item. Frye penetrates to pattern where others perceive only a hodgepodge of old fairytales and random psychological archetypes. He assembles these patterns laboriously into a structure which is become his theory, and it is for the student to decide whether to accept or reject Frye, or to take bits and pieces of his conclusions and adapt them to current use.

I am struck that the Anatomy appeared shortly before the heyday of the literary renaissance of the 1960s, and it's easy to see why this book provided a timely roadmap for many who were to launch their own explorations of that other-dimensional spacetime of limitless literary possibility toward the end of that turbulent decade. But it is now 2015 as I write these words and the world has changed again, so that now the Anatomy almost feels like both a triumphant summation of centuries of literature and its scholarly criticism as well as a final fanfare before the darkness which was to come. For we every day sink deeper into a new Dark Age in which all that Frye clearly cherished and believed in is rejected by our modern society ― one bridles at calling it a culture ― as impractical, non-utilitarian and dangerously liberal. We live in a time in which free-thought is summarily rejected, in which we are to aspire to become useful tools of the state, to collect our pittance and go home and plug in to the bread-and-circus world series and pennant races and celebrity shenanigans de jour and cheer on the outrageous tantrums of our political party of choice. Reading literature for literature's sake has become a sign of perversity, a symptom that one is improperly integrated into the social machine. Despite Frye's careful arguments, he now seems impossibly old-fashioned, a relic of the past, a brief harbinger of a world-to-come that failed to thrive and to survive.

I am a scientist ― and an admirer of science ― by training, a cog in an industrial nightmare by vocation and a writer by choice. I would not be uplifted as an exemplar of the society in which I find myself. Unlike all those who surround me, seemingly, I believe our culture ― not this toxic society ― has now a more pressing need for broad liberal arts education than perhaps ever before. Any society that values monetary profit and ransacking the planet far above tending the needs of its constituent citizens is sick, and a return to the arts, including the literary arts and theories of their criticism, must surely be part of the requisite cure. So I believe that Frye may grow dusty on the shelves for years to come, or for decades to come, or maybe even longer, but one day Frye will be read again when the wheel has turned sufficiently. Then a more encompassing theory of criticism will be put forth, leaving much of the Anatomy behind, no doubt, but incorporating its mythic essence at least, and there will be a culture which will advance upon his work. Then, once again, the theories of literature and criticism will be reborn, and they will be appropriately valued.

[Ezra James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ties up 3,000 years of beautiful tradition from Moses to Sandy Koufax in a neat bundle of efficiency. A must-read for anyone interested in literary criticism. Frye’s outline of genres, themes, archetypes, motifs, and myth are nothing short of a monumental effort in clarity.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the greatest triumphs of literary criticism both as scholarship and as literature in its own right. Like some of the best literary criticism (and not coincidentally like Frye's definition of literature), its ideas may superficially resemble assertions but are really postulates that are neither true nor falsifiable; they create or participate in a parallel world of interlinked hypotheses the integrity of which is more important than its correspondence to some underlying reality. In other words, the point of this book is not so much to describe the totality of that real object that we call "literature" but to establish the freedom of literary criticism to imagine the possibility of such a totality in the first place.

That may be rather cryptic, but this is an exceedingly dense, rewarding, and fertile book that abounds in intellectual incitement. Summary would only demonstrate my own limitations.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is quite a slog. I think I can only recommend it to teachers and students of literature. This is, if I understood it, a manual that sets up a structure for defining literature and then a process for understanding it. You’re going knee deep in the murky waters of what is literature. Bring your waders and if you run into trouble, head for land.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book (1957) is an insane Blakean view onto Western literary totality, a set of theories as stacking dolls, a proto-structuralist polemic against dispersed schools of criticism and against 'literary taste' for 'archetypal criticism,' for the ideology of the 'eternal return.' There's some sniping against critics who thought "criticism couldn't become a science," but Frye wasn't going to take "criticism couldn't become a science"... for an answer. There's also some rushing to create a space for criticism in the disciplinary ladder. All in all, a very pretty mandala.

1) historical criticism: theory of mode
a) myth b) romance c) high mimetic d) low mimetic e) ironic

A historical sequence, a circle of ethoses: how a protagonist is depicted against his peers/background (fiction/mythos) or how a poet presents his prophecy to the people (thematic/dianoaia). From divine to risible.

2) ethical criticism: theory of symbol
a) literal [motif] b) descriptive [sign] c) formal [image] ]d) mythical [archetype] e) anagogic [monad]

How to read the "symbol" in medieval times, or like a historical critic, or like a new critic, or like a Jungian/Frazerian, or a William Blake. (All of the above).

3) archetypal criticism: theory of myth
a) comedy b) romance c) tragedy d) irony

Myth has already written all the categories of the Apocalyptic (that's everything perfect) and Demonic (that's really bad). There's the same four set of characters adapted for each (the alazon, eiron, bomolochon, and agroikos [loudmouth, straight man, class clown, and tightass]), adapted for each season; and there's a sequence of six flavors of each season, which follow the modes as outlined in the first essay.

4) rhetorical criticism: theory of genre
a) drama [...] b) epic [metric recursion] c) fiction [continuity] d) lyric [association]

A genre derives its strength from its rhythm, though rhythms mix all the time, and there's no ideal types that exist in the Real World, hombre. You could run every genre through the five modes or the four myths, if you'd like. (This is what Frye does).

In conclusion, Aristotle already did it.

[Eric Byrd]

Frye writes like a genial, slightly waggish but awesomely learned professor talks. This book should be subtitled, "The Mutations of Storytelling." Easygoing and smoothly narrated next to the nigh-nightmarish Wimsatt & Welleck.

Some:

"The disadvantage of making the queen-figure the hero's mistress, in anything more than a political sense, is that she spoils his fun with the distressed damsels he meets on his journey, who are often enticingly tied naked to rocks or trees, like Andromeda or Angelica in Aristo."

[Jacob Wickham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Northrup Frye argues that literary criticism is a way of thinking, defining it thus: "… by criticism I mean the whole work of scholarship and taste concerned with literature which is a part of what is called variously liberal education, culture, or the study of the humanities. I start from the principle that criticism is not simply a part of this larger activity, but an essential part of it" (3). Literature is not taught, criticism is taught. He places criticism, and the humanities on the same level as mathematics and the sciences. He intends to rescue literary criticism from the sense that it is taste, which is entirely based on what is the current moral climate. To do this, he takes the various strands of criticism and posits a unity between them. He seeks to elucidate a structure or framework for studying literature. In my reading, the word, typology came to mind. He is setting up all the different interpretative and methodical concepts together to form a coherent whole. He suggest that criticism is like science in many ways; in introduction he suggests that like early science, criticism needs to realize that it is conceptual framework to work in (15). He argues further that criticism should not lean on theories outside literature to explain literature, but rather it should look to literature to explain literature. Criticism in his thinking is a problem of interrelationships.

He brings together all the different critical positions and concepts of literature. The first essay is concerned with modes, which refers to the hero’s power of action in relation to the audience and the environment. He sees five different modes: myth, romance, high mimetic, low mimetic and ironic, where the hero’s power is reduced from divinity to less than the reader’s. Frye appears to see some sort of historical progression through these modes, but he also suggests a cycle, where ironic leads back into myth. After these modes, he examines these modes in tragedy and then in comedy. Finally he examines the thematic mode. Thematic here is a way of saying idea; the thematic mode puts the story after or behind the organizing idea of the literature. This response paper falls into the thematic mode, as its main concern is the idea of book, though part of this is the construction. He notes the ancient Greeks saw six aspects to poetry: mythos (plot), ethos (character and setting), dianoia (idea or poetic thought). The other three (melody, diction and spectacle) he leaves for later. Dianoia is what we are concerned with when we ask what the story’s point is. (52). To discuss ethos, he defines internal fictions (hero and his society) and external fictions (the author and his society). He states that all literature has a fictional and thematic aspect. In the comic, the hero tends to integrate with his society (or creates a new society). In the tragic, the hero tends to isolate from society.

The second essay concerns symbols, which are units isolated for attention by the critic. Here the framework come from phases. Phase, in this essay, mean the context in which the narrative and meaning of a work is considered (367). There are five phases: literal, descriptive, formal, archetypal (elsewhere he calls this one central) and finally anagogic. The literal and descriptive are dicussed together; here the symbol is motif and sign. Frye is critical of the popular use of the term literal: it is used for “unimaginative illiterates” or to suggest something is free from ambiguity (76). Here he means it as the poem itself (77). The literal meaning of a poem is the interrelationship of the poems parts; the whole of the poem. In the formal phase, the symbol is image. The form of a poem remains the same whether read from beginning to end or seen as a whole; thus both pattern and narrative. Next he examines the mythical phase, where symbol is archetype, closely tied to romance. Here I felt most comfortable. Poetry here is a technique of civilization. Finally he discusses the anagogic phase: symbol as monad. Monad means unity or one; thus Frye’s sense that it is the center of an individual’s literary experience. The individual is separated from society. Anagogic means spiritual or elevated.

The next essay concern archetypal criticism, which Frye places in the center. Within archetypal criticism, there are several theories of meaning: apocalyptic imagery. Here the basic terms for the rest of the essay are set up. The imagery that are changed according to mode, imagery in the divine world, the human world, the animal world, the vegetable world and the mineral world. Here paradise dominates. The second section deals with demonic imagery, which is something of the apocalyptic imagery reverse: the waste land and hell affect imagery. Analogical imagery is the subject of the third section: the innocent world. Next he introduces the theory of mythos: which is concerned with movements. The movements are centered around spring (comedy), summer (romance), autumn (tragedy), winter (irony and satire). In each section he examines the movement, the affect on the characters and environment. These mythos are unified in an overtly Christian way: he calls them “for aspects of a central unifying myth” (192). The themes of these are: agon – conflict, the archetype of romance, pathos - catastrophe , the theme of tragedy, sparagmos – which is the sense that heroism is absent, disorganized or doomed to defeat (192), this is the theme of irony and satire. Finally there is anagnorisis – the triumphant recognition of a new born society, the theme of comedy. It was at this point in the book that I began to see the interrelationship of literature that Frye speaks of. In these sections he connects the social or real world, but I don’t feel I understand how. I wonder if he suggests that our narratives form our reality.

He notes that romance has six phases, three which are interrelated to tragedy and three to comedy. In fact, tragedy, comedy and irony are all related in this way. As I read the section on tragedy, I asked this question: what is the relationship of literature to the “real world”? Tragedy for example overlays many explanations or descriptions of the world’s state or process. For example, global warming, not in just movies (Day after Tomorrow) but in news reports, conversations and musing, human society is pitted as a tragic hero that reached too far and is now in the process of a tragedy. I also began to wonder about how Frye approaches something like the Christian bible: What is something like the Christian interpretations of Old Testament and New Testament interpretations? God forces Adam and Eve to leave the garden of Eden because they reached to high: they leave paradise and yet all their potential remains, and this is the bitter emotional (tragic) problem. This story is a tragedy. And yet, in the Christian theology, this is necessary; Christ fulfills this potential and returns them to society, or creates a new society. This story becomes a comedy, and wraps the tragedy of Adam and Eve within itself, thus is becomes something else, does it not, with an down and then upward movement. Is the garden of Eden then just a initial situation to begin the comedy?

The last essay is concerned with the theory of genres. He posits that literature could be described as rhetorical organization of grammar and logic (in the sense of the medieval trivium). Here he considers the other three aspects of poetry: melos (rhythm), lexis (verbal texture) and opsis (spectacle). The sections examine different “rhythms,” that is the movement of the words. Epos (oral narrative – face to face) has a rhythm of recurrence; prose of continuity; drama of decorum, lyric of association.

I feel like it might be helpful to map out all the interrelationships he posits along with definitions: something like a webpage with popout boxes with the definitions and lines drawn between each concept and its subcategories and interrelationships. His argument and subject suggest the interrelationship of various genres, modes and phases; these interrelationships are overwhelming to comprehend. I categorize his efforts as a typology of literature. Like mathematics, Frye sees literature as a language, thus the interrelationships take on importance as a way of knowing; he posits metaphor as an equivalent of equations, suggesting that both are tautologies (350). Metaphors also form an important part of Frye’s conception of criticism as a way of knowing, seen especially in the second essay. Metaphors define a relation between two symbols, whether abstract or concrete. The relation between symbols can be read through the phases that Frye sees in literature. Literal metaphors simply juxtapose two symbols. Descriptive metaphor makes a statement of likeness. Formal metaphors provide an analogy. Archetypal metaphor provides identity of a individual with a larger set. Anagogic metaphor states a hypothetical identity (366). If I were to teach the material from this book, I would create a visual representation of the ideas and have students read selections that would help to make the ideas concrete. The material is rather overwhelming, but creates a sense of unity of literature and a starting point for looking at literature, both methodically (this book fits this mode, this phase, this genre, etc.) and theoretically (conceptions of literature).
I also find interesting his use of the term, conceiving in his tentative conclusions: “The mathematical and the verbal universe are doubtless different ways of conceiving the same universe” (354). The word conceive has suggesting of creation. Frye wants literature, or criticism of literature, to have central place in the humanities and in liberal education; he says that it creates the universe in a way, not in the sense of a god, but creates an order of the universe, that is not different from the universe that mathematics or natural science does.

[Gustavo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism is an attempt at providing an objective way of looking at Literature from its creation until our present day (the late 1950s in this case). His method is primarily a scientific one, which delves into literary works the same way a physicist or a biologist might look at a phenomenon in nature, while at the same time trying to organize it:

“To derive a common principle for a given literary category, make a table of the possible species of that category, and go look for members of that species.”

His intention is to make Literature more comprehensible by showing us that all the great literary works form a part of a larger whole, so that the reader will be able to ‘connect the dots’ by him/herself eventually. According to him, Literary Criticism stands between History (human action) and Philosophy (thought/intellect). We cannot talk about experiencing literature, only about its criticism, and this is precisely what the book’s four essays are all about.

The bulk of AoC consists mainly of analyzing Literature as a system, containing many commonalities (archetypes) and/or recurring elements throughout history. Within this framework, a process of zooming out takes place, which one could relate to different subjects, such as Comparative Literature (The Western Canon), Semiology, Philology, Anthropology, and others. We are taken from the microcosm of character power scales within a story onwards into symbols, myths, all the way to the macrocosm of genres in Literature. By doing so, we unravel the structural similarities between written works from millenniums ago all the way to the 20th Century: We become acquainted not only with a variety of terms and descriptions about how certain literary tropes have developed over time/social context, but also with how they all relate to one another, from the Ancient Greeks to James Joyce. This is surely one of the greatest attempts at mapping out such a gargantuan subject, along with Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces and Sir James George Frazer’s Golden Bough.

Having said that, we should not overlook the fact that Frye did not intend to make any final statement about Literature and its criticism. AoC is merely a toolkit for developing a better way to understand the great literary works - that is -  by studying the works themselves, evaluating them for what they originally are (i.e. to think of Literature as an autonomous language ,self-contained). With greater understanding comes greater appreciation.

To conclude, I would like to mention that this book definitely deserves a lot more credit than it (seemingly) gets. For one thing, AoC could easily be described as one of the finest explorations into the ‘imaginative well’ of humankind, a conceptually dense but immensely rewarding read that will expand your mind and renew (if not entice) your love of books and reading.

[sean]

nice evocation of tragic pathos bro. now do it in a high mimetic mode

[Yomna Saber · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must-read for anyone working on literature and literary criticism.

[Lisa of Troy]

English Literature Critisim Recommended Reading List at Oxford According to Benjamin McEvoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1Q2J...

[Christy · Rating 3 out of 5]

On trying to read Northrop Frye 30 years after European critical theory stormed the gates of the academy, leaving the humanities, which were retrospectively ripe for collapse, in a kind of fall-of-Rome state of confusion and disillusionment, I was actually reminded (again - it comes up often for me these days) of Shelley’s poem:

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains – round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The Classically-descended celestial clockwork world Frye created his magisterial critical system from and for is vanishing before our eyes, like Newton’s universe did after Einstein. Like many elaborate attempts to model some aspect of the world in a system, this one’s biggest, most ironic flaw is its failure to take the defining reality of time into account. But maybe actually a Copernican metaphor is better here – Frye, like Harold Bloom, and then a bevy of less intelligent and more reactionary late 20th century culture warriors, saw Western literature at the center of something that has been revealed to have no permanent center – human history.

There’s no bringing back the past, but Frye’s system does offer anybody who has more than a beach reader’s interest in Western literature some clever and useful ways to think about the forms it has taken and the techniques that have been applied in it from pre-history to the 20th century modernists, anyway. (Whether Frye’s project has any relevance to other literary traditions I can’t say.) Thank goodness Anatomy of Criticism has a good Wikipedia page. I'd recommend that. You get the gist of the system without every tedious example or obsolete hypothesis. That’s enough.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an absolutely wild ride of a book. Academia in the first part of the twentieth century, especially if you were a white man, must have simply been a time. Not that Frye is embodying any particular negative -ism in this book; I only mean that he didn’t feel in any way inhibited in the way he thought or how he expressed it. And he’s kind of a bitch. I love that in my Modernist academics.

His undergirding thesis is that art criticism is an art in its own right, with which I wholeheartedly concur. This book is – I think! – an attempt to provide a framework for the serious critic about the ‘universal’ nature of stories, tropes, and characters, stretching all the way back to earliest civilization. It’s an impressive project and Frye mostly gets there.

He starts out by saying that art contains multitudes of which even the artist themself is unaware:

‘It is the critic whose wide reading reveals literature’s deeper truths, of which the individual authors are dimly aware at best.’

(Related: Theodor Adorno: ‘Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.’)

In the Polemical Introduction, he points out that there’s no direct relationship between art’s merit and its public reception, and that the only way to stop criticism is to censor it. Which, no.

‘On this [parasitic] theory critics are intellectuals who have a taste for art but lack both the power to produce it and the money to patronise it, and thus form a class of cultural middlemen, distributing culture to society at a profit to themselves while exploiting the artist and increasing the strain on his public.’

‘Art for art’s sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilised life itself. The only way to forestall the work of criticism is through censorship, which has the same relation to criticism as lynching has to justice.’

This hilarious quote refers back to the idea that the artist might not be the best authority on their own work, actually:

‘While Ibsen maintains that Emperor and Galilean is his greatest play and that certain episodes in Peer Gynt are not allegorical, one can only say that Ibsen is an indifferent critic of Ibsen.’

As Frye says, critics aren’t obliged to stick with ‘getting out’ what the artist ‘put in’.

‘What critics have now is a mystery-religion without a gospel, and they are initiates who can communicate, or quarrel, only with one another.’

He says that every literary hierarchy of values is based on concealed moral, social, and intellectual analogies.

‘It is still possible for a critic to define as authentic art whatever he happens to like, and to go on to assert that what he happens not to like is, in terms of that definition, not authentic art.’

ARGH I LOVE YOU.

In the First Essay, he talks about the grand divisions of stories into high mimetic, low mimetic, ironic, and comic. I found it telling that ‘the imitation of nature produces plausibility’ – not truth or reality.

These are the basic forms as Frye divides them, using a lot of academic language. There’s a huge and – in 2022 – kind of hilarious assumption that the reader of this text will have a working knowledge of Greek and Latin as well as a few European language. Hilarious, sad? I’m sad I don’t.

There’s the mythical plane, romance, high mimetic – which revolves around royal courts and quests, low mimetic – involving an extraordinary person in panthestic rapport with nature, and ironic, which focuses on craft.

You can critique art as a product, using catharsis as aesthetic distance, or as a process, in which ‘ecstasis’ (new word for me!) is a state of identification.

In The Second Essay, Frye laments that there’s no technical word for a work of ‘literary art’, aside from ‘poem’, which doesn’t capture enough.

In the Middle Ages, the critical schema was literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogic (spirtual) meanings. Now, Frye says – now being the 1950s, of course – you must accept multiple meanings.

‘The student must either admit the principle of polysemous meaning, or choose one of these groups and then try to prove that all the others are less legitimate. The former is the way of scholarship, and leads to the advancement of learning; the latter is the way of pedantry, and gives us a wide choice of goals, the most conspicuous today being fantastical learning, or myth criticism, contentious learning, or historical criticism, and delicate learning, or “new” criticism.’

There are also two ways of reading: inward, where you make sense of the verbal pattern, and outward, where you go from words to what they mean. In outward reading, the correspondence between phenomena and a verbal sign is what constitutes ‘truth’. In inward reading, meaning comes from the responses of pleasure, beauty, interest. Poetic ‘truth’ doesn’t depend on descriptive truth but on conformity with hypothetical postulates (something I feel a lot of current writers don’t grasp). These postulates are ones agreed in advance with the reader and constitute ‘conventions’.

‘A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send cheques to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.’

LOL

And! If you do accept these archetypes or postulates, you must accept the idea of a self-contained literary universe containing universal symbols –! Literature, then, exists in its own verbal universe, where everything is identical to everything else. It speaks not to uniformity, but unity – the way you are unified with your childhood self.

Also, he calls an intentional fallacy the idea that a writer has the primary intention of conveying meaning, and the critic has the primary duty of capturing said meaning.

‘One has to assume, as an essential heuristic axiom, that the work as produced constitutes a definitive record of the writer’s intention.’

‘[...] Milton, who asked for nothing better than to steal as much as possible out of the Bible.’

Hee hee.

‘The fact that revision is possible, that a poet can make changes in a poem not because he likes them better but because they are better, shows clearly that the poet has to give birth to the poem as it passes through his mind. He is responsible for delivering it in as uninjured a state as possible, and if the poem is alive, it is equally anxious to be rid of him, and screams to be cut loose from all the navel-strings and feeding-tubes of his ego.’

THIS IS SO ACCURATE

He points out that you can, as a critic, examine a poem as an imitation of nature but also as an imitation of another poem … and that, in liberal education, something ought to be liberated.

‘Beauty in art is like happiness in morals: it may accompany the act, but it cannot be the goal of the act, just as one cannot “pursue happiness”, but only something else that may give happiness.’

‘It is inadvisable to assume that an Adonis or Oedipus myth is universal, or that certain associations, such as the serpent with the phallus, are universal, because when we discover a group of people who know nothing of such matters we must assume that they did know and have forgotten, or do know and won’t tell, or are not members of the human race. On the other hand, they may be confidently excluded from the human race if they cannot understand the conception of food, and so any symbolism founded on food is universal in the sense of having an indefinitely extensive scope. That is, there are no limits to its intelligibility.’

Imagination transcends the limits of the naturally possible and the morally acceptable. Between religion’s ‘there is’ and poetry’s ‘what if this is’, there’s always tension.

In The Third Essay, Frye does a deep dive into the structures of comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony/satire. He says they all track to myths, which are ‘the limitations of actions at the conceivable limit of desire’. Turning a literal act into eg a play is ‘liberalising’ life by releasing fact into imagination.

‘The possession of originality cannot make an artist unconventional; it drives him further into convention, obeying the law of the art itself, which seeks constantly to reshape itself from its own depths, and which works through its geniuses for metamorphosis, as it works through minor talents for mutation.’

He claims sheep form the basis of original religious myths.

‘Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones.’

‘Civilisation tends to try to make the desirable and the moral coincide. [...] how completely all the higher religions have limited their apocalyptic visions to morally acceptable ones.’

First, comedy. Comedy describes the movement from one society to another. The new society fors around the hero at the point of comic discovery or ‘anagnorisis’. This is marked by a ritual, usually a wedding. The ordeals are tests of the hero’s character and usually involve being pitted against an older man. The hero is a neutral figure, to allow for wish fulfillment. Happy endings are usually the result of manipulation: unlikely conversions, miraculous transformations, providential assistance. The action of a comedy is from law to liberty.

‘Even in Shakespeare there are startling outbreaks of baiting older men, and in contemporary movies the triumph of youth is so relentless that the moviemakers find some difficulty in getting anyone over the age of seventeen into their audiences.’

Then, romance. Romance is a wish fulfillment dream. It involves nostalgia for a golden age childhood. The characters generally go on a quest and maintain their integrity against the assault of experience. You can get a ‘pensoroso’ version of this in contemplative adventure stories, such as cozy groups or dystopian settings.

Then, tragedy. This centres the hero’s isolation. Fate is the strongest force here, often omnipotent. That’s one formula; the other is a violation of a moral law resulting in paradise lost. Hero tends to recognise what they’ve forsaken at some point. Frye points out that to turn sad into happy is easy, but it’s very hard to turn happy into sad.

Finally, irony/satire. This deals with the ambiguity of unidealised existence. Irony involves realism and tragedy, while satire deals with fantasy, an implicit moral standard, and a comic struggle between two societies. There’s two phases. The irony without displacement preaches that the world is awful and counsels pragmatism. The comedy of escape (eg picaresque) describes a successful rogue who makes conventional society look foolish.

‘One sometimes gets the impression that the audience of Plautus and Terence would have guffawed uproariously all through the Passion.’

I love this man.

The Fourth Essay deals with rhetorical criticism. This gets into the technicalities of grammar, logic, and writing itself.

In epic writing, Frye talks of the metre as the organising rhythm. I wish I’d been taught this in school properly. The four-stress line is dealt with in great and interesting detail.

Epics are intended to be read aloud. Poems, it’s more like you’re overhearing the poet. In plays, a speaking voice doesn’t necessarily signify direct address. Dialogue is a mimesis of conversation. The way it works is that poets get used to writing in certain metres and then they think that way when they write. Apparently Shaw thought it was easier to write a comic play in blank verse than prose! Frye says that ‘free verse’ is a revolt against epos and metre that doesn’t become prose, but articulates a ‘third’ rhythm. For poets, rhythm comes before the word selection.

‘[...] it is perhaps possible to describe Wagner’s operas as fermented oratorios.’

Oh Northrop.

‘Jung’s persona and anima and counsellor and shadow throw a great deal of light on the characterisation of modern allegorical, psychic, and expressionist dramas, with their circus barkers and wraith-like females and inscrutable sages and obsessed demons.’

Oh so THAT’S what that is.

Frye then deals with specific forms, which, to be honest, are a bit above my head as a non-literature student. Prayer, for example, imitates the ‘rhetoric of praxis’ by using short phrases and being close to free verse.

Then he talks above prose forms. The novel is extroverted and personal, dealing with the person in society; romance is introverted, personal, and subjective; confession is introverted and intellectual; and Menippean satire is extroverted and intellectual. There’s a fifth form of sacred texts and scripture.

‘The literary historian who identifies fiction with the novel is greatly embarrassed by the length of time that the world managed to get along without the novel, and until he reaches his great
deliverance in Defoe, his perspective is intolerably cramped.’

The Bible is the defining myth.

‘The tremendous cultural influence of the Bible is inexplicable by any criticism of it which stops where it begins to look like something with the literary form of a specialist’s stamp collection.’

LOL

‘[..] [The Iliad’s] theme is menis, a song of wrath. It is hardly possible to overestimate the importance for Western literature of the Iliad’s demonstration that the fall of an enemy, no less than a friend or leader, is tragic and not comic.’

Did you know that ‘katabasis’ was where – to gain information about the future – the hero descends into the underworld? I did not.


Then there’s the rhetoric of non-literary prose. Invective: sermons. Philippic: cancelling your enemies. Eulogy: advertising. Conceptual: remove emotion, philosophy. Dissociative: breaking down a habitual response in teaching. Legal: qualifying inclusiveness, ie, jargon.

‘Anything which makes a functional use of words will always be involved in the technical problem of words, including rhetorical problems. The only road from grammar to logic, then, runs through the intermediate territory of rhetoric.’

‘There is no reason why a poet should be a wise and good man, or even a tolerable human being, but there is every reason why his reader should be improved in his humanity as a result of reading him. Hence while the production of culture may be, like ritual, a half-involuntary imitation of organic rhythms or processes, the response to culture is, like myth, a revolutionary act of consciousness.’

In the beautifully-named Tentative Conclusion, Frye finishes on the point that we are hampered by the assumption that the explanation of what a myth IS is what the myth MEANS. Myths can mean an indefinite number of things.

‘Thus the question of whether a thing ‘is’ a work of art or not is one which cannot be settled by appealing to something in the nature of the thing itself.’

It’s all about the … CONTEXT.

Historical criticism relates culture only to the past, ethical criticism only to the future. A liberal education allows people to imagine society as one free, classless, and urbane, which is why it thinks about works of the imagination.

‘The imaginative element in works of art [...] lifts them clear of the bondage of history.’

Thanks Northrup. Reading this book was an excellent life choice for my own, self-directed liberal education.

[Esteban · Rating 3 out of 5]

Algo muy rescatable de Frye es el alcance de lo que se propone. su instrumental está pensado para incluir a los textos religiosos, mitográficos y épicos, y se adapta sin complicaciones a la ficción popular. la casuística preferida de Frye puede ser un poco mohosa a veces, pero eso no le impide pensar lúcidamente desde un nivel lo suficientemente abstracto para trascenderla.
Una crítica corriente a Frye apunta a su esquematismo. al leer Anatomy of Criticism queda claro que sin el marco de sus tipologías y sus correspondencias su escritura se volvería muy desordenada. en el primer ensayo logra hacer rendir el esquematismo dando lo que promete, pero no es el caso del resto, donde las tipologías aparecen sumergidas en un pantano de digresiones y recapitulaciones.
Habiendo leído su excelente Fearful Symmetry, sospecho que Frye razonaba dentro del marco de lo que Philippe Descola llama el analogismo, una ontología donde todos los elementos se aparecen discontinuos, y que requiere valerse de analogías, equivalencias, escalas y jerarquías para organizar el caos. en el caso de Frye el marco proviene principalmente de la religión, y su imaginación teórica es muy parecida a la de un teólogo.

Algunas notas para uso personal del primer ensayo:

+ las ficciones pueden ser clasificadas de acuerdo a la capacidad de acción (power of action) de sus héroes en comparación con la "nuestra" (ay esa complicidad):
1. mito : héroe cualitativamente ("in kind") superior a otros humanos y a su entorno, un ser divino.
2. romance : héroe cuantitativamente ("in degree") superior a otros humanos y a su entorno; sus acciones son maravillosas pero se lo identifica como un ser humano. transgresiones a las leyes de la naturaleza; leyendas, folk tales, cuentos de hadas, marchen, etc. armas encantadas, animales parlantes, brujas, magos, etc.
3. modo mimético superior (high mimetic) : héroes cuantitativamente superior a otros humanos, pero no a su entorno natural. épica y tragedia. el héroe que Aristóteles tenía en mente
4. modo mimético inferior (low mimetic) : héroes con los que deberíamos poder identificarnos (the hero is one of us [34]). "on this level the difficulty in retaining the word "hero", which has a more limited meaning among the preceding modes, occasionally strikes an author". comedias, ficción realista.
5. modo irónico : "if inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves, so that we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity, the hero belongs to the ironic mode. This is still true when the reader feels that he is or might be in the same situation, as the situation is being judged by the norms of a greater freedom".

+ dentro de cada uno de los cinco modos hay dos distinciones internas (un estructuralista hablaría de oposiciones binarias); lo trágico y lo cómico (separación e integración del protagonista respecto a su sociedad), e ingenuidad y sofisticación.

+ dos fragmentos que me interesaron:
45: "In some religious poetry, for example at the end of the Paradiso, we can see that literature has an upper limit, a point at which an imaginative vision of an eternal world becomes an experience of it. In ironic comedy we begin to see that art has also a lower limit in actual life. This is the condition of savagery, the world in which comedy consists of inflicting pain on a helpless victim, and tragedy in enduring it"
46: "But the element of play is the barrier that separates art from savagery, and playing at human sacrifice seems to be an importante theme of ironic comedy".

[Zo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mind-bogglingly comprehensive/ambitious/impressive. My knowledge of literature is not robust enough to contend with many of Frye's more specific classifications, and I do think he runs into many of the larger philosophical issues of any classificatory schema like this, but he also qualifies his statements and admits of relativity in all the right places, leading me to feel like he presents a fairly workable picture. And what a picture it is! So much of the theory-building seems to align perfectly, and the experience of having statements of his "click" into place happened over and over for me. I think the heights of the book are the introduction and the ending when he talks more broadly about the relation of rhetoric to logic/grammar and the status of literary language. His ideas there seem rich with philosophic significance, similar to others I've encountered in the world of philosophy (Danto, Wittgenstein, Quine among others), but also expand on them in their own way. Worth revisiting for in-depth thinking about the nature of metaphor/language/rhetoric/etc. I also loved some of the climactic parts of the archetypal accounting, especially the discussion of encyclopedic/comprehensive forms in the theory of genres. His claims there seem fairly contestable, at least in terms of magnitude, but I nonetheless was left with the sense he was getting at *something* in an inspiring fashion. I want to understand more why this "method" fell out of fashion because this does seem like it should be almost mandatory reading for literary study. Brilliant work.

[Sananab · Rating 2 out of 5]

A favourite writer of mine loves Frye, so I thought I might like this by association. No. I didn't hate it, and I thought some of the theories were interesting. Overall, I found it trivial and underwhelming. Real insight took a backseat to categorizing, and the examples he used to categorize felt a bit cherry-picked.

He also seemed to think of Henry James and Edmund Spencer as two of the most important people in western literature, which made the whole thing oppressively dreary.

[Silvia · Rating 4 out of 5]

it’s not a proper review (and northrop would shout at me just for this), but an helpless wish to gain even one tenth of the author’s knowledge and insight into that unity of not merely human genius that is literature and its indirect science. Something that you cannot miss reading for a further dive in language and its art

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was quite strange and there was much in it that I didn’t understand. I could have used some charts or diagrams to explain all the schemes of four or five or six categories. But this book’s scope is impressive, and its language is often poetic and compelling. A book like this probably couldn’t be written today because it would be considered too wide-ranging and too generalized.

[Burcu · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good start to literary criticism. It’s neat and tidy with clear boundaries. Purposefully limited scope is making it easy to grasp the complete picture.

However, absolutely and completely the opposite of where critical theory is today. Frye’s insistence of limiting analysis to literature and refusal to incorporate any social science (never mind other fields such as physics or biology) leaves him absolutely outdated in our current understanding of entangled, relational, and relative existence.

As an example, though his theory is called archetypal criticism, he refuses to incorporate Jung because his field, psychology, is a “separate” field than literature.

Still, he is much better in his reflexivity and open mindedness compared to his predecessors.