Archetypal criticism
pp. 98-102
in: K. M. Newton (ed), Twentieth-century literary theory, Berlin, Springer, 1988Abstract
Northrop Frye has been the most influential of those critics who have argued that archetypal patterns underlie the modes, plots and genres of literary works. In his major work, The Anatomy of Criticism, he states: "I mean by an archetype a symbol which connects one poem with another and thereby helps to unify and integrate our literary experience" (p.99). His aim in this book is to establish a "grammar of literary archetypes' which will reveal that western literature is a coherent and unified structure that can respond to what Frye regards as a scientific form of critical analysis. Thus he argues for a systematic form of criticism opposed to impressionism, historicism and close linguistic analysis of the New Critical type. Frye's work has some similarities with structuralism and it has been argued that his work helped to make American criticism receptive to the structuralist and post-structuralist concepts which had become dominant in French criticism.
