Abstract

With the publication of Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, Northrop Frye had already recognized that some egress had to be found from the theoretical impasse of insisting on an autonomy that cut literature off from more and more. Whereas American New Criticism saw the structure of the individual work as unique and self-sufficient, Frye insisted that there were structures that overrode the specific contexts of individual works. The structures of individual works were not worlds unto themselves, but were conditioned by contexts and structures broader than they. Works were not made ex nihilo; they were made out of literature, and Frye seemed to imply what T.S. Eliot had stated some thirty years before him: that there was an order of works that affected and was affected by the individual work.1 Unlike the American New Critics who insisted - at least in their extreme period - that the individual poem had an induplicable context, Frye insisted on the duplicable context, and on the fact that certain images and basic structures are repeated throughout Western literature. · 1. Frye actually pays high tribute to Eliot’s The Function of Criticism and his concept of literature as an ideal order of works and not simply the collection of writings of individuals. He says, "This is criticism and very fundamental criticism. Much of this book attempts to annotate it" . Edward Wasiolek, is author of Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction and editor of the five-volume edition of Dostoevsky's notebooks for which he received the Gordon J. Laing Prize. He is Avalon Foundation Professor and chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago