The Secular Scripture : A Study of the Structure of Romance

Northrop Frye

ISBN 10: 0674796764 / ISBN 13: 9780674796768

Published by Harvard University Press Jan 1978, 1978

About this Item

Neuware - Northrop Frye's thinking has had a pervasive impact on contemporary interpretations of our literary and cultural heritage. In his Anatomy of Criticism, a landmark in the history of modern critical theory, he demonstrated his genius for mapping out the realm of imaginative creation. In The Secular Scripture he turns again to the task of establishing a broad theoretical framework, bringing to bear his extraordinary command of the whole range of literature from antiquity to the present. Romance, a mode of literature trafficking in such plot elements as mistaken identity, shipwrecks, magic potions, the rescue of maidens in distress, has tended to be regarded as hardly deserving of serious consideration; critics praise other aspects of the Odyssey, The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's last plays, and Scott's Waverley novels, for example, while forgiving the authors' indulgence in childishly romantic plots. Frye, however, discerns in the innumerable romantic narratives of the Western tradition an imaginative universe stretching from an idyllic world to a demonic one, and a pattern of action taking the form of a cyclical descent into and ascent out of the demonic realm. Romance as a whole is thus seen as forming an integrated vision of the world, a secular scripture whose hero is man, paralleling the sacred scripture whose hero is God. The clarity of Northrop Frye's perception, the scope and suggestiveness of his conceptualizing, the wit and grace of his style, have won him universal admiration.

Seller Inventory # 9780674796768

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Secular Scripture : A Study of the Structure of Romance
• Publisher: Harvard University Press Jan 1978
• Publication Date: 1978
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674796764
• ISBN 13: 9780674796768
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 202W x 126H x 17D millimeters 202 millimeters width by 126 millimeters height by 17 millimeters depth
• Weight: 236 grams

About this title

Synopsis

“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.

About the Author

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) was a Canadian literary theorist and the author of more than twenty books, including Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake and Anatomy of Criticism. A member of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Frye received thirty-six honorary doctorates during his lifetime. He was University Professor at the University of Toronto.