Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays is Northrop Frye’s masterful 1957 book that presents principles of literary criticism by drawing upon a wide survey of Western literature from Homer to Joyce. An “essay” is literally an attempt at describing something, and in this book, Frye offers four theories that attempt to define categories of literature and keywords for doing literary criticism.
The book begins with a “Polemical Introduction.” A polemic in this sense is like a manifesto, and Frye is intending to lay out a strong claim for how literary criticism should be done, attacking others for how they have done it instead. In particular, Frye argues for thinking of criticism as a science. Such a science is interested in studying the underlying patterns and categories of literature, just like physicists look for the laws of gravity underlying our experience of the physical world. That means criticism should be inductive, making categories from reading literature itself. In the essays that follow, Frye offers four such categories. Each category facilitates a different kind of criticism.
Frye starts with modes in the “First Essay.” A mode refers to the power of action that characters have in a work of literature. Frye argues there are principally five modes. The first, mythic, is when characters are superior to their world and to the reader, like gods. In the romantic mode, the main character is a hero who is better than his environment but is still a man, not a god. In a high mimetic mode, the character is a similarly admirable human, but he is not more powerful than his environment. In a low mimetic mode, that character is like an everyman, equal to everyone. Finally, in an ironic mode, the characters iare lower than the average man: scoundrels, for instance.
In the “Second Essay,” Frye looks at symbols. He considers five different aspects in which symbols can be talked about, or five different types of symbol. Each refers to the relation that a symbol has to something else. In a motif, the symbol is related only within the work of literature itself. In a sign, the symbol refers to something outside the text, naming or describing the world. In an image, the symbol not only refers to the outside world but also invokes particular feelings. In an archetype, an image recurs across multiple works of literature. Finally, in a monad, a symbol refers to something universal, like human nature. The five different types or “phases” of symbol thus move from small to big in terms of frame of reference: from contained to the text itself to referring to all of mankind.
The “Third Essay” is about myths, which are groupings of symbols. Sometimes, images recur together in master plots like good versus evil. Frye discusses a number of these types of groupings, especially in terms of the type of imagery they involve: imagery of the divine world, the human world, the animal world, the vegetable world, and so on. But he is particularly interested in a pattern that recurs across different groups of images, which is a division of imagery into four phases that are like the four seasons: spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Imagery has a lifecycle just like the course of a year, from the birth of spring to the death of winter. Frye argues these four phases correspond to four “mythoi” or primary categories of literature: comedy (spring), romance (summer), tragedy (autumn), and satire (winter).
In the “Fourth Essay,” Frye turns his attention to genre, which he defines as the primary form in which a work of literature is presented. There are, according to Frye, four main genres. Dramas are works primarily presented by actors on a stage. Epos are works spoken by a poet to an audience, including the classic Greek epics like the Odyssey but also any poem intended to be recited out loud. Lyrics are works addressed from an individual poet to another individual, like an address to God or a lover. Finally, fictions are works primarily printed on a page. This includes all the modern novels.
