Northrop Frye
Based on Wikipedia: Northrop Frye
In 1947, a Canadian scholar without a PhD published a book that made one of England's most baffling poets suddenly make sense. William Blake had written poems filled with strange prophetic visions, cosmic battles, and invented mythologies that many dismissed as the ramblings of a madman. Northrop Frye looked at those same poems and found a coherent system—a unified vision drawn from Milton's Paradise Lost and the Bible. The book was called Fearful Symmetry, and it didn't just rehabilitate Blake. It launched Frye toward becoming what Harold Bloom would later call "the foremost living student of Western literature."
But here's what makes Frye truly interesting: he wasn't content to simply interpret individual works. He wanted to know if there was a science of literature itself.
The Typing Contest That Changed Literary Theory
Frye's path to academia began, improbably, with a typing competition. Born in 1912 in Sherbrooke, Quebec, and raised in Moncton, New Brunswick, the young Northrop Frye traveled to Toronto in 1929 to compete in a national typing contest. He stayed.
At Victoria College, part of the University of Toronto, he studied philosophy and edited the college literary journal. Then came theology at Emmanuel College, ordination as a minister in the United Church of Canada, and a brief, apparently unforgettable stint as a student minister in Saskatchewan. He went on to study at Merton College, Oxford, where he served as secretary of the Bodley Club—a literary society that had counted among its members figures like Oscar Wilde.
He returned to Victoria College and never really left. This would be his intellectual home for the rest of his career, eventually becoming chancellor. He spent a year as the Norton Professor at Harvard in 1974, a prestigious visiting position, but Toronto remained his base.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canada's federal law enforcement agency, kept files on him. Their intelligence service watched his participation in anti-Vietnam War activities, academic forums about China, and his activism against South African apartheid. This surveillance says something about the times, and perhaps something about how seriously authorities took the influence of public intellectuals.
The Audacious Claim
Ten years after his Blake book made him famous, Frye published the work that would define his legacy: Anatomy of Criticism, in 1957. The title itself was ambitious—an anatomy suggests a systematic dissection, a scientific examination of component parts.
And that was precisely Frye's audacious claim. He asked: what if literary criticism isn't just a matter of taste or opinion? What if it's a discipline with its own principles, its own body of knowledge, as rigorous in its way as biology or physics?
This might sound obvious today, but it was radical. Literary criticism had long been treated as a kind of parasitic activity—clever people offering their subjective reactions to works created by genuinely creative people. Frye wanted to change that. He argued that criticism must be "a structure of thought and knowledge existing in its own right."
He put it memorably, borrowing from John Stuart Mill: the artist is not heard but overheard. The poet, Frye insisted, cannot talk about what he knows. The critic's job isn't to channel the author's intentions or to judge whether a work is good or bad. It's to understand what the work is and how it relates to other works within the vast order of literature itself.
The Order of Words
So where does this body of critical knowledge come from? Frye's answer emerged from his careful reading of the greatest works of literature across centuries and cultures. He noticed something striking: the classics kept returning to primitive formulas. The same patterns, the same structural shapes, appeared again and again.
He called these recurring patterns archetypes—conventional myths and metaphors that form a kind of skeleton underlying all literature. Just as biologists discovered that vastly different animals share underlying skeletal structures, Frye argued that vastly different literary works share underlying archetypal patterns.
This was his "inductive leap," as he called it. Just as Darwin's theory of evolution provided biology with an organizing principle that made sense of the diversity of life, Frye proposed that literature isn't a random pile of individual works. It's an order of words—a systematic structure that criticism can study scientifically.
The archetypes aren't imposed from outside. They're not Marxist categories or Freudian complexes or any other ideological framework brought in to explain literature. They emerge from literature itself, from the imagination's own recurring patterns. This distinction mattered enormously to Frye. He saw critics who attached their analysis to external frameworks—whether economic, psychological, or political—as committing what he called the "deterministic fallacy." They were substituting a critical attitude for actual criticism.
Myth as the Mother of Literature
Where do archetypes come from? For Frye, the answer was mythology.
Every human society, he observed, possesses a mythology—a collection of stories that are inherited, transmitted, and eventually diversified into what we call literature. Literature is, in his memorable phrase, "displaced mythology." The story of a modern realistic novel and the story of an ancient creation myth are distant relatives, sharing structural DNA even when their surface details couldn't be more different.
This idea came to Frye partly through his reading of Giambattista Vico, an eighteenth-century Italian philosopher who argued that human societies develop through cycles, with myth preceding rational thought rather than being a primitive version of it. For Frye, myth wasn't something literature grew out of and left behind. Myth remained the deep structure that gave literature its power to communicate across centuries and cultures.
Think about it this way: ideologies change constantly. What seemed obviously true to a medieval reader would strike a modern reader as superstitious nonsense, and vice versa. Yet somehow, stories from ancient Greece or medieval Japan or the Hebrew Bible continue to move readers today. How? Frye's answer was that beneath the ideological surface, the mythological structure endures. The recurring patterns of quest, descent, transformation, and return speak to something in the human imagination that transcends any particular historical moment.
Centripetal and Centrifugal
Frye used a pair of terms borrowed from physics to describe two fundamental movements in criticism: centripetal and centrifugal.
Centripetal criticism moves inward, toward the structure of the text itself. It focuses on sound, rhythm, imagery, word choice—the aesthetic machinery that makes a poem or novel work as a verbal artifact. When you analyze how the rhyme scheme of a sonnet creates a particular emotional effect, you're being centripetal.
Centrifugal criticism moves outward, away from the text and toward society. It asks how literature connects to the world beyond the page—to politics, to economics, to social movements, to history. When you analyze how Uncle Tom's Cabin influenced attitudes toward slavery, you're being centrifugal.
Consider Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." The poem is predominantly centripetal—it draws you into its sounds, its images, its internal music. Yet it also has centrifugal tendencies, relying on the reader's knowledge of ancient Greek pottery, of art history, of aesthetics. The movement isn't purely one way or the other.
Now consider Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. It pushes outward, connecting its characters and stories to the urgent social question of slavery in America. Yet it also has centripetal elements—the syntax that creates character, the word choices that establish mood, the narrative techniques that generate emotional response.
Frye insisted that genuine criticism needs both movements. The New Critics of his era—a school that dominated American literary studies in the mid-twentieth century—emphasized centripetal analysis, the close reading of texts as self-contained aesthetic objects. Frye respected this but found it incomplete. Structural analysis alone, he said, has "the same limitation in criticism that it has in biology." It can describe what something is, but it can't explain how it came to be or what its relatives are.
The Liberating Power of Archetypal Criticism
Here's where Frye's work connects to something larger than academic literary theory. He believed that understanding the mythological structures underlying literature has an emancipatory function.
Every society, Frye argued, indoctrinates its members with an ideology—a set of beliefs about how the world works and how people should behave. This ideology sits on top of a deeper mythological layer that most people never examine. When students learn to recognize the recurring archetypal patterns across different literatures and different cultures, they gain what Frye called "emancipatory distance" from their own society's particular mythology.
They begin to see that the stories their culture tells them are versions of stories that humans have always told, and that other cultures tell differently. This recognition doesn't destroy meaning—it expands it. It gives students access to what Frye called the Longinian sublime, a higher human state that isn't accessible through direct experience but that transforms and expands experience once encountered.
The ancient Greek critic Longinus wrote about the sublime as a quality in literature that elevates the soul, that takes readers beyond themselves. Frye saw archetypal criticism as a path toward that elevation. By understanding how literature works at its deepest structural level, readers could move from passive consumers of their culture's mythology to active participants in the larger human conversation that literature embodies.
The Romantic Imagination
When asked whether his critical theory was Romantic, Frye answered without hesitation: "Oh, it's entirely Romantic, yes."
He meant Romantic in the sense he attributed to Blake—"giving a primary place to imagination and individual feeling." For Frye, literature wasn't primarily a vehicle for ideas or arguments. It was an artifact of the imagination, part of a potentially unified imaginative experience that includes ritual, myth, and folk tale alongside novels, poems, and plays.
This sets Frye apart from critics who see literature primarily as a reflection of social conditions or as a tool for ideological critique. For Frye, literature has its own integrity, its own laws, its own world. That world is "governed by conventions, by its own modes, symbols, myths and genres." Criticism must operate within that imaginative world rather than trying to reduce it to something else.
This doesn't mean literature has nothing to do with society. The centrifugal movement is real and necessary. But for Frye, the story—not the argument—stands at the center of both literature and society. The base of human social life is mythical and narrative, not ideological and dialectical. We live by stories before we live by arguments.
The Man Behind the Theory
Frye married Helen Kemp in 1937. She was an educator, editor, and artist, and their marriage lasted nearly fifty years. She died in 1986 in Australia, where she had accompanied Frye on a lecture tour. Two years later, he remarried—to Elizabeth Eedy Brown, the widow of a politician and the sister of a writer.
He died in 1991 and was buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto, the same cemetery that holds the graves of Glenn Gould, the eccentric genius pianist, and William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada's longest-serving prime minister. It's a fitting resting place for someone who spent his life thinking about how individual works connect to larger patterns.
The fact that Frye never earned a PhD became a kind of famous footnote to his career. Here was one of the most influential literary theorists of the twentieth century, a man whose Anatomy of Criticism became required reading in graduate programs around the world, operating without the credential that academia typically demands. It suggests something about the era he came from—and perhaps something about the difference between credentials and genuine intellectual achievement.
Influence and Legacy
Frye's influence spread far beyond academic literary criticism. Margaret Atwood, who would become one of Canada's most celebrated novelists and the author of The Handmaid's Tale, studied under him. Harold Bloom, the American critic famous for his theory of the "anxiety of influence" and his passionate defense of the Western canon, acknowledged Frye as a major influence on his own thinking.
The approach Frye pioneered—archetypal criticism—became one of the major schools of literary analysis in the latter half of the twentieth century. Even critics who disagreed with his methods had to contend with his framework. His insistence that criticism could be systematic, that literature possessed an internal order available to analysis, changed expectations for what literary scholarship could accomplish.
Perhaps more importantly, Frye offered a vision of what literature is for. In his view, literature isn't merely entertainment or cultural prestige. It isn't primarily a reflection of economic conditions or a tool for social change, though it can be both. Literature is the repository of humanity's imaginative experience—the place where myths get transmitted, transformed, and kept alive. To study literature seriously is to gain access to that accumulated imaginative wisdom.
What criticism can do, Frye believed, is "awaken students to successive levels of awareness of the mythology that lies behind the ideology in which their society indoctrinates them." That's a grand claim for a discipline often dismissed as subjective opinion about books. But Frye spent his career building the theoretical foundation that might make such a claim defensible.
Myths to Live By
Near the end of his career, Frye wrote about what he called the "kerygmatic mode"—a term borrowed from theology meaning proclamation or transformative speech. In this mode, myths become "myths to live by" and metaphors become "metaphors to live in."
This is where Frye's work transcends academic literary theory and touches on something like wisdom literature. The archetypes aren't just patterns to be identified and catalogued. They're structures that can expand our horizons, that can transform how we experience our own lives. The recurring patterns of quest and return, of descent and ascent, of death and rebirth—these aren't just interesting features of old stories. They're maps of human possibility.
Frye never lost his connection to his origins as a minister, even as he became a secular literary theorist. The kerygmatic mode represents his attempt to articulate how literature can function the way sacred texts function—not as dogma to be believed but as imaginative structures that reveal possibilities for human experience that we couldn't have discovered on our own.
Literature, in Frye's vision, teaches us not what to think but how to imagine. And imagination, properly cultivated, expands what we're capable of being.
That's a claim worth taking seriously, especially in an era when literature sometimes seems like a marginal cultural activity, something people do when they're not looking at screens. Frye would argue that the mythological structures underlying literature continue to operate whether we're conscious of them or not—in movies, in video games, in the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. Understanding those structures doesn't diminish their power. It lets us participate in that power more fully.
The man who started with a typing contest in Toronto and ended up rewriting how the world understood William Blake never stopped believing that literature mattered in the deepest possible way. His career was a sustained argument that taking literature seriously—really seriously, with systematic rigor—could transform not just how we read but how we live.