Archetypal Criticism: A Brief study of the Discipline and the Sempiternal Relevance of its Pioneers

Northrop Frye was a Canadian literary critic and theorist. He was born on 14th July,1912 in Sherbrooke in Quebec, Canada. Harold Bloom called him a “Miltonic figure” (qtd. By Bloom in an interview) of literary criticism for his exemplary and original contributions to the field of literary criticism. Frye was educated at the University of Toronto where he was a theology and philosophy major. He then did his postgraduate degree in English at Merton College, Oxford. In 1939 he returned to Canada and started teaching at Victoria College, University of Toronto where he spent the rest of his literary career. Northrop Frye is viewed as a pioneering critic of archetypal criticism. His first book The Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake written in 1947 was a highly original study of Blake's poetry and is considered a seminal critical work. He shot to international fame with the publication of his book titled The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays written in 1957 “which redirected American literary theory away from the close reading of New Criticism and towards the larger meanings of literary genres, modes and archetypes.” (Drabble 386). Regardless of the critical evaluation, he stressed on a value-free science of criticism. Frye in most of his works elaborate a comprehensive map of the literary universe in a schematic series of classifications. He has written over twenty books on various subjects including culture, myth, social thought and archetypal theory. His famous works include The Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology, Secular Scripture, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, Spiritus Mundi, The Well-Tempered Critic and Northrop Frye on Shakespeare. Frye was a polymath who had extensive knowledge on various subjects such as western culture, archetypal criticism, religion, anthropology et cetera. The Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology, published in 1963 is the collection from which the essay “The Archetypes of Literature” is taken. It was originally published in The Kenyon Review in 1951. Frye analyses literature with respect to various rituals and myths. He drew inspiration from many sources including the Bible, Blake's prophetic books, Oswald Spengler, Sigmund Freud and James George Frazer. But the main source of influence was the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. Frye was immensely influenced by his account of the collective unconscious. But ironically Frye objected to being called a Jungian critic because he said that the literary critics should be concerned only with the ritual or dream patterns and need not concern themselves with how the symbols actually got there.