The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance

“The most sophisticated study of popular culture, considered on a world scale, that we have yet had.”―New Republic

The acclaimed author of Anatomy of Criticism on the role of romance as a literary genre in Western culture.

At a time when literary criticism was dominated by close reading of individual works, Northrop Frye’s sweeping, millennia-spanning investigations of the recurring symbols and archetypes that shape our literary traditions made him one of the most influential critics of his generation. Here, Frye brings his encyclopedic knowledge to bear on romance, a genre whose tropes have echoed through Western literature since the Homeric epics.

With its shipwrecks and magic potions, its plots of mistaken identity and the rescue of maidens in distress, romance has often been deemed unworthy of serious critical attention. Critics praise other aspects of The Odyssey or The Faerie Queene, for example, while forgiving the authors’ indulgence in childishly romantic plots. For Frye, however, romance is far more than a puerile form of escapism. Rather, it constitutes a vital mythological universe, a “secular scripture” whose hero is man, paralleling the sacred scripture whose hero is God. Its plot elements―the descent into a lower world or escape into a higher one, the discovery of true identity and the breaking of enchantment, the quest where the end is the beginning transformed―form nothing less than “the structural core of all fiction.”

Drawing freely from an enormous range of sources, from Dante and Milton to Lewis Carroll, from fairy tales to dime novels, The Secular Scripture ultimately argues that the Word of God and the word of man are cut from the same cloth. By recovering our own human mythologies, appreciating them in all their artifice, we can, like God in Genesis, look over the vast romance we have created and see that it is good.