Northrop Frye's literary criticism is one of the distinctive achievements of modern critical thought. Harold Bloom refers to Frye as "the leading theoretician of literary criticism among all those writing in English today," and in their anthology Modern Literary Criticism: 1900-1970 (1970), Lawrence Lipking and A. Walton Litz place Frye alongside T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and I.A. Richards as the major critics of the century. "More than any other modern critic," says Lipking, "he stands at the center of critical activity." Frye is, moreover, one of the few North American critics with an international reputation, a distinction that results in large measure from Anatomy of Criticism (1957), perhaps the most influential book of literary theory published in the last half century. It is primarily on the basis of this book that Frye has come to be the most frequently cited living writer in the arts and humanities, ranking...