Four Intriguing Ideas from Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism
Autonomous Verbal Structures Frye can’t start critiquing literature without first defining what literature is. (Actually, in the introduction he starts at the very beginning by defining criticism itself. Pedantic? A little. Worth reading? Definitely.) He eventually settles on what I find to be one of the more intriguing definitions of literature: “autonomous verbal structures.” Outside…