“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. “Northrop Frye’s criticism is so richly textured, so dense with insight, and so wide-ranging in its references... The Secular Scripture is in fact the most sophisticated study of popular culture, considered on a world scale, that we have yet had.” ― New Republic “His breadth of learning and his consistently penetrating insights lend engrossing substance to his thesis…provide the literary vehicle that enables what he calls ‘the secular scripture’ to encompass the spectrum of man’s experience from idyllic to demonic. Frye literally weaves an enchanting prose tapestry out of this concept.” ― Publishers Weekly “Movingly democratic and optimistic...Frye is the legitimate heir of a Protestant and Romantic tradition that has dominated much of British and American literature, the tradition by which each person reads Scripture for himself or herself without yielding to a premature authority imposed by Church or State or School. This is Frye’s true greatness, and all who teach interpretation are indebted to him for precept and for example.” ― Harold Bloom , New York Times Book Review “A landmark book, essential reading for anyone who wishes to explore the interrelations of folklore and literature.” ― Carl Lindahl , Journal of American Folklore 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. Used Book in Good Condition