ABSTRACT
Northrop Frye has a history and is, on his own terms, a critic in tune with literary history. While rumours swirled around Frye-he was a formalist without regard for history-few of his fellow critics noticed Frye’s practice of literary history, as a record of conventions and genres in Western literature from Homer onwards. Some critics, of course, were genuinely concerned with what they perceived to be Frye’s penchant for the synchronic even when he was discussing history and literary history. In the 1940s and 1950s he was reacting to the positivist approach to history or historicism that was pursued, along with New Criticism, in departments of literature. He seems to have thought that intellectual history, as practised by Arthur Lovejoy and E.M.W. Tillyard, was less subject to correction or reorientation. Frye’s sense of irony and satire made him aware of the capricious and labyrinthine nature of the House of
Fame. He probably understood that he was, in part, attacked and praised in proportion to his success. A leading critic at a given time fulfils the needs of a historical period and expresses its anxieties and desires, so that the very systematic overview that Anatomy enabled soon became subject to critique. What gave Frye his strength soon provided his weakness. Reputation can pare away the complexities of the work of a writer or critic. I am trying to recollect Frye’s complexity by reintroducing his intricate view of history. In this chapter I want to go to the work that sets out Frye’s theory of literature, his system, Anatomy of Criticism. Here, I shall concentrate on the ‘Tentative Conclusion’ of Anatomy because it is a leaving off and a point of departure since it ends a study of literary form and convention and begins a phase in Frye’s career which is a transition to a consideration of history, society and ideology.
