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REVIEWS Anatomy of Criticism Periodically since the Renaissance, important intellectual developments outside the field of literature have produced books on literary criticismusually with a word like "poetics," "elements," "principles," or "science" in the title-which reformulate literary theory from first principles, in order to accommodate existing materials to the new concepts. In sixteenth-century Italy a number of treatises attempted to adjust Aristotle's Poetics to the doctrines and literary forms of a Christian culture. In the mid eighteenth century Lord Kames set out to assimilate the psychology of sensation and association to neoclassical literary theory by ascending "to principles from facts and experiments," in the hope by this procedure to convert the new science of mind into "the science of criticism." Coleridge's Biographia Literaria was the product of his persistent attempt to act as "the arbitrator between the old school and the new school," and to bring inherited critical concepts into line with the idealism and organicism of contemporary German philosophy. Some thirty-five years ago I. A. Richards, in his Principles of Literary Criticism, restated traditional critical ideas in terms both of the psychology of impulse and equilibrium and of the new and exciting field of semantics. Looked at in the light of these works, Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton University Press [Toronto: S. J. Reginald Saunders & Co. Ltd.], 1957, pp. x, 383, $6.90) is an attempt to resystematize the field of criticism so as to save the existing phenomena, yet to work in the implications for literary analysis of three recent and interrelated developments: depth psychology, the theories of ritual and myth in Frazer and other cultural anthropologists, and the revival of serious interest in mediaeval symbology. Professor Frye has written a big, packed, compendious, and audacious book. He undertakes specifically a "science" of criticism which, following the model of the modern natural sciences, is constructed on the basis of "an inductive survey of the literary field." His aim is to achieve what criticism has always lacked, a body of knowledge which, like any genuine science, will be systematic, coherent, and progressive (pp. 6-11). This knowledge is not to be exclusive but "synoptic"; that is, it will incorporate everything that is valid in existing approaches to literature. Aristotelian poetics, aesthetic criticism, literary history and scholarship, the new criticism of text and REVIEWS 191 texture, the newer criticism of myth and archetype, mediaeval hermeneutics -all are accepted and given their due places in a single critical system. Frye puts his claim modestly: the book consists of tentative "essays ... on the possibility of a synoptic view." But it is clear that, however subject to refinement and expansion, these essays are conceived as the prolegomena to any future criticism. The book considers all varieties of literature, from the simplest and most "na·ive" to the most sophisticated and complex, and it moves from the elementary treatment of metrics and sonantal patterns, through the analysis of images and symbols, to the consideration of charactertypes , narrative structures, and genres. Constantly it yields a freshness of insight by cross-cutting the traditional perspectives and stereotypes of criticism. It is a strikingly original achievement, of bewildering scope and complexity. And it raises a host of questions which will provide topics of literary debate for years to come; the book will be attacked and it will be defended, but it will not be ignored. All a reviewer can do, after a preliminary reading, is to identify a few of the larger issues that it so spectacularly raises. First is the question of the synoptic system itself. In Frye's conspectus, the field of criticism falls into a diagrammatic form with multilateral symmetries . There are, for example, five modes of criticism, in parallel with five phases of symbolism; then three kinds of archetypes, each exhibited in seven matched categories, and falling, in their narrative forms, into the four cardinal mythoi (comedy, romance, tragedy, and satire), arranged in a circle so that each has two neighbours and an antithetic form; furthermore, each mythos incorporates, mutatis mutandis, the same four character-types, and is subdivided into six phases or species; these in turn divide neatly down the middle, three approximating ever more...

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