Northrop Frye
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Herman Northrop Frye (14 July 1912 – 23 January 1991) was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.
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[edit] Quotes
- I wrote Fearful Symmetry during the Second World War, and hideous as the time was, it provided some parallels with Blake's time which were useful for understanding Blake's attitude to the world. Today, now that reactionary and radical forces alike are once more in the grip of the nihilistic psychosis that Blake described so powerful in Jerusalem, one of the most hopeful signs is the immensely increased sense of the urgency and immediacy of what Blake had to say.
- Preface of the 1969 edition of Fearful Symmetry : A Study of William Blake (1947)
- Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.
- Words with Power : Being a Second Study of The Bible and Literature (1990), p. xiii
[edit] Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)
- This book forced itself on me while I was trying to write something else, and it probably still bears the marks of the reluctance with which a great part of it was composed.
- Prefatory Statements and Acknowledgements
- A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.
- Polemical Introduction
- The only way to forestall the work of criticism is through censorship, which has the same relation to criticism that lynching has to justice.
- Polemical Introduction
- What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a "pure" or "exact" science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.
- Polemical Introduction
- Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.
- Polemical Introduction
- Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.
- Polemical Introduction
- Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study...
- Polemical Introduction
