Northrop Frye and Myth Criticism

The relationship between myth and literature has always attracted the attention of scholars, most of which have even regarded literature as a subcategory of myth. Meanwhile, Northrop Frye, a western literary critic, was the first to establish the relationship between myth and literature as a systematic framework within the body of literary criticism. This paper attempts to have a glance at the New Criticism and the position of Frye within this school, and then focuses on his experiments with the myth-literature relationship. Before dealing with his method, we should have a brief look at his experimental method of recourse to the Holy Bible and then its synthesis with the archetypal approach that is, on the one hand, inspired by Frazer’s Comparative Anthropology and, on the other hand, is impressed by Jungian Psychology. It will then discuss two key concepts of displacement and condensation in Frye’s literary criticism theory where they are applied to explain the growth and evolution of literary structures from the heart of myth.