Description
Book SynopsisNorthrop Frye’s The Secular Scripture was first published in 1976 and was soon recognized as one of his most influential works, reflecting an extensive development of Frye’s thoughts about romance as a literary form. This new edition in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye series brings The Secular Scripture together with thirty shorter pieces pertaining to literary theory and criticism from the last fifteen years of Frye’s life.
Frye’s study illuminates the enduring attraction and deep human significance of the romance genre in all its forms. He provides a unique perspective on popular fiction and culture and shows how romance forms have, by their very structural and conventional features, an ability to address both specific social concerns and deep and fundamental human concerns that span time and place. In distinguishing popular from elite culture, Frye insists that they are both ultimately two aspects of the same “human compu
Table of Contents
Preface Credits and Sources Abbreviations Introduction * The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance * The Word and World of Man * The Context of Romance * Our Lady of Pain: Heroes and Heroines of Romance * The Bottomless Dream: Themes of Descent *Quis Hic Locus? Themes of Ascent * The Recovery of Myth * Romance as Masque * Letter to the Editor of Parabola * The Responsibilities of the Critic * Comment on Peter Hughes's Essay * Literature, History, and Language * On Translation * Extracts from The Practical Imagination: Stories, Poems, Plays * Vision and Cosmos * Literature as a Critique of Pure Reason * Approaching the Lyric * The Survival of Eros in Poetry * The Ouroboros * Literary and Linguistic Scholarship in a Postliterate World * The End of History * Myth as the Matrix of Literature * The Koine of Myth: Myth as a Universally Intelligible Language * The Symbol as a Medium of Exchange * The Expanding World of Metaphor * Extracts from The Harper Handbook to Literature * Letter to the Editor of PMLA * Lacan and the Full Word * Literature and the Visual Arts * The Journey as Metaphor * Framework and Assumption * Maps and Territories * Epilogo * Auguries of Experience * Literary and Mechanical Models * Literature as Therapy * Response to Papers on "Northrop Frye and Eighteenth-Century Literature" Notes Emendations Index
