Northrop Frye Quotes

A collection of quotes by Northrop Frye.

Northrop Frye (1912-1991) was a renowned Canadian literary critic and literary theorist. Born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Frye grew up in Moncton, New Brunswick. He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto and then pursued his graduate studies at Merton College, Oxford.

Frye's works revolutionized the field of literary criticism and established him as one of the most influential theorists of the 20th century. His most famous work, "Anatomy of Criticism" (1957), laid out his groundbreaking ideas on the archetypal patterns found in literature and the theory of literary genres. In this work, Frye argued that literature follows an underlying structure, or "anatomy," that can be analyzed to gain a deeper understanding of literary texts.

Beyond his theories on literary criticism, Frye was also an expert on William Blake, publishing several books and articles on the poet and artist. He saw Blake as a prophetic visionary whose work transcended traditional literary boundaries. Frye's engagement with Blake's ideas further shaped his own theoretical framework.

Throughout his career, Frye held academic positions at various institutions, including Victoria College and the University of Toronto. He received numerous accolades and honors for his contributions to the field of literary studies. Northrop Frye's ideas remain influential in literary scholarship and continue to inspire critical approaches to analyzing and interpreting literature.

The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what deve

The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.

Religion Science Philosophy Literature Mythology

No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can

No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself.

Experience Life Imagination Art Science Literature

What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a pure

What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a pure or exact science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.

Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated

Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its mode

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verb

It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition.

It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcen

It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.

Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy inte

Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.

The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes

The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones.

Between religion's this is and poetry's but suppose this is,

Between religion's this is and poetry's but suppose this is, there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.

Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that

Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet b

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.

In our day the conventional element in literature is elabora

In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.

The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than t

The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.