Whatever the attitude toward Northrop Frye's prodigious schemes, one cannot doubt that, in what approaches a decade since the publication of his masterwork [Anatomy of Criticism], he has had an influence—indeed an absolute hold—on a generation of developing literary critics greater and more exclusive than that of any one theorist in recent critical history. One thinks of other movements that have held sway, but these seem not to have depended so completely on a single critic—nay, on a single work—as has the criticism in the work of Frye and his Anatomy. For example, pervasive as was T. S. Eliot's influence, it joined almost at once and indistinguishably with that of a number of followers who tried to systematize the master's casual essays drawn together from here and there. But with Frye, there is no difficulty disengaging master from disciple, nor even Frye's own later...