page_title: Northrop Frye
section_title: Frye's conceptual framework for literature
hierarchical_section_title: Northrop Frye / Contribution to literary criticism / Frye's conceptual framework for literature
caption_attribution_description: English: Northrop Frye Hall at the University of Toronto
context_page_description: Herman Northrop Frye CC FRSC was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.
  Frye gained international fame with his first book, Fearful Symmetry, which led to the reinterpretation of the poetry of William Blake. His lasting reputation rests principally on the theory of literary criticism that he developed in Anatomy of Criticism, one of the most important works of literary theory published in the twentieth century. The American critic Harold Bloom commented at the time of its publication that Anatomy established Frye as "the foremost living student of Western literature." Frye's contributions to cultural and social criticism spanned a long career during which he earned widespread recognition and received many honours.
context_section_description: In seeking integrity for criticism, Frye rejects what he termed the deterministic fallacy.  He defines this as the movement of "a scholar with a special interest in geography or economics [to] express . . . that interest by the rhetorical device of putting his favorite study into a causal relationship with whatever interests him less" (Anatomy 6). By attaching criticism to an external framework rather than locating the framework for criticism within literature, this kind of critic essentially "substitute[s] a critical attitude for criticism." For Frye critical integrity means that "the axioms and postulates of criticism . . . have to grow out of the art it deals with" (Anatomy 6).
  Taking his cue from Aristotle, Frye's methodology in defining a conceptual framework begins inductively, "follow[ing] the natural order and begin[ning] with the primary facts" (Anatomy 15). The primary facts, in this case, are the works of literature themselves. And what did Frye's inductive survey of these facts reveal? Significantly, they revealed "a general tendency on the part of great classics to revert to [primitive formulas]" (Anatomy 17). This revelation prompted his next move, or rather, 'inductive leap':
  I suggest that it is time for criticism to leap to a new ground from which it can discover what the organizing or containing forms of its conceptual framework are. Criticism seems to be badly in need of a coordinating
  principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomena it deals with as parts of a whole (Anatomy 16).
  Arguing that "criticism cannot be a systematic [and thus scientific] study unless there is a quality in literature which enables it to be so," Frye puts forward the hypothesis that "just as there is an order of nature behind the natural sciences, so literature is not a piled aggregate of 'works,' but an order of words" (Anatomy 17). This order of words constitutes criticism's conceptual framework, its coordinating principle.
caption: Northrop Frye Hall, University of Toronto
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