ABSTRACT
The association of Marxism and romance therefore does not discredit the former so much as it explains the persistence and
vitality of the latter, which Frye takes to be the ultimate source and paradigm of all storytelling.4 On this view, the oral tales of tribal society, the fairy tales that are the irrepressible voice and expression of the underclasses of the great systems of domination, adventure stories and melodrama, and the popular or mass culture of our own time are all syllables and broken fragments of some single immense story.
