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.


Book Description
Striking out at the conception of criticism as restricted to mere opinion or ritual gesture, Northrop Frye wrote this magisterial work proceeding on the assumption that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge in its own right. In four brilliant essays on historical, ethical, archetypical, and rhetorical criticism, employing examples of world literature from ancient times to the present, Frye reconceived literary criticism as a total history rather than a linear progression through time. Literature, Frye wrote, is "the place where our imaginations find the ideal that they try to pass on to belief and action, where they find the vision which is the source of both the dignity and the joy of life." And the critical study of literature provides a basic way "to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in." Harold Bloom contributes a fascinating and highly personal preface that examines Frye's mode of criticism and thought (as opposed to Frye's criticism itself) as being indispensable in the modern literary world.


The Merriam-Webster Encylopedia of Literature
Work of literary criticism by Northrop Frye, published in 1957 and generally considered the author's most important work. In his introduction, Frye explains that his initial intention to examine the poetry of Edmund Spenser had given way in the process to a broader survey of the ordering principles of literary theory. The four essays address modes, symbols, myths, and genres, corresponding respectively to what Frye sees as the historical, ethical, archetypal, and rhetorical dimensions of literary expression. In his view, the task of evaluating a particular poem or novel falls to the reviewer, while the critic brings to light those aspects of a work that situate it within the body of literature.


About the Author
Northrop Frye was University Professor in the University of Toronto and Professor of English in Victoria College, University of Toronto. His books include "Fearful Symmetry: A Study Of William Blake" (Princeton).

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Striking out at the conception of criticism as restricted to mere opinion or ritual gesture, Northrop Frye wrote this magisterial work proceeding on the assumption that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge in its own right. Employing examples of world literature from ancient times to the present, he provides a conceptual framework for the examination of literature. In four brilliant essays on historicak, ethical, archetypical, and rhetorical criticism, he applies "scientific" method in an effort to change the character of criticism from the casual to the causal, from the random and intuitive to the systematic.

Harold Bloom contributes a fascinating and highly personal preface that examines Frye's mode of criticism and thought (as opposed to Frye's criticism itself) as being indispensable in the modern literary world.

FROM THE CRITICS

Commonweal

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.

Nation

This is a brilliant but bristling book, an important though thoroughly controversial attempt to establish order in a disorderly field....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.

Hudson Review

Does literary criticism need a conceptual universe of its own? Professor Frye has written a brilliantly suggestive and encyclopedically 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.

Modern Language Review