Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays

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. more

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Recent Reviews

5/5: From: Amazon; Posted: Jan-21-2008; A Marvelous Book; I bought this book in 1999, under the influence of a prominent professor of English literature; I waited until now to read it, and wish I hadn't. So might you, even if eminence in literary studies is not an aspiration of yours, as it...; read full review | report as inappropriate

3/5: From: Amazon; Posted: May-08-2007; Erudite musings; The book is moderately curious but very overrated. Btw, the author himself doesn't pretend it is more than it is: he freely admits in the preface that his book is incomplete and, for example, cannot be taken as an exposition of his...; read full review | report as inappropriate

5/5: From: Amazon; Posted: Feb-02-2007; Essential; It really is of no importance, whether you agree with Frye, or you do not. After all, such things only matter if you are yourself literature historian, and you already developed your own viewpoints of the literature or culture and what...; read full review | report as inappropriate

5/5: From: Amazon; Posted: May-11-2005; sweeping vision; In this classic work Frye takes a long view of literature, and discerns deep structural patterns. In Essay I he charts a progression in the history of western literature from myth through romance through realism to irony in which the...; read full review | report as inappropriate

Selected Reviews

5/5: From: Amazon; Posted: Jan-21-2008; A Marvelous Book; I bought this book in 1999, under the influence of a prominent professor of English literature; I waited until now to read it, and wish I hadn't. So might you, even if eminence in literary studies is not an aspiration of yours, as it...; read full review | report as inappropriate

3/5: From: Amazon; Posted: May-08-2007; Erudite musings; The book is moderately curious but very overrated. Btw, the author himself doesn't pretend it is more than it is: he freely admits in the preface that his book is incomplete and, for example, cannot be taken as an exposition of his...; read full review | report as inappropriate

2/5: From: Amazon; Posted: Mar-30-2001; Mantra of the Clichý; What ever your college teacher has told you, imaginative literature is not about ideas and opinions. Collapsible soapboxes have nothing to do with art. But sensitivity, sensual quality, lucidity of image and thought, fantasy, and diction...; read full review | report as inappropriate