Page "Northrop Frye" Paragraph 37

Once asked whether his critical theory was Romantic, Frye responded, " Oh, it's entirely Romantic, yes " ( Stingle 1 ).

It is Romantic in the same sense that Frye attributed Romanticism to Blake: that is, " in the expanded sense of giving a primary place to imagination and individual feeling " ( Stingle 2 ).

As artifacts of the imagination, literary works, including " the pre-literary categories of ritual, myth, and folk-tale " ( Archetypes 1450 ) form, in Frye's vision, a potentially unified imaginative experience.

He reminds us that literature is the " central and most important extension " of mythology: ".

every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature " ( Words with Power xiii ).

Mythology and literature thus inhabit and function within the same imaginative world, one that is " governed by conventions, by its own modes, symbols, myths and genres " ( Hart 23 ).

Integrity for criticism requires that it too operates within the sphere of the imagination, and not seek an organizing principle in ideology.

To do so, claims Frye,