Frye, Northrop
FRYE, NORTHROP. The reputation of Northrop Frye (1912–1991) as a literary theorist was originally based upon his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), a book that sought to provide a structural framework for the study of literature through an analysis of its various modes, symbols, myths, images, and genres. The Anatomy, heralded for a generation as a twentieth-century Poetics, had a large following in the 1960s and 1970s, and twenty years after its publication it was the most frequently cited book in the arts and humanities by a writer born in the twentieth century. Seventeen translations of the Anatomy into thirteen languages (as of 2003) attest to its international standing. But some thirty books followed in the wake of the Anatomy, and the scope of Frye's work as a whole has come into focus with the publication of his collected works. While Anatomy of Criticism will remain an important twentieth-century study of literary conventions, it seems likely that Frye's major contribution will be defined by the books that serve as bookends of his career: at the beginning, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947), and at the end, his two books on the Bible and literature, The Great Code (1982) and Words with Power (1990)—as well as his posthumous The Double Vision (1991).
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