Quote

Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphoric thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writerenters intoa structure of traditional stories and images.

Northrop Frye

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Northrop Frye
Age: 78 †
Born: 1912
Born: July 14
Died: 1991
Died: January 23
Cleric
Literary Critic
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Literature
Concepts
Mythology
Story
Structure
Literary
Society
Telling
Habits
Stories
Tradition
Mature
Thought
Sun
Images
Metaphoric
Become
Conscious
Gods
Mythical
Like
Habit
Traditional
Structural
Principles
Fully
Develops

More quotes by Northrop Frye

Image
The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones.
Northrop Frye
Image
We do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres.
Northrop Frye
Image
[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
Northrop Frye
Image
Poetry can only be made out of other poems novels out of other novels.
Northrop Frye
Image
One of the most obvious uses of literature, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance... Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them also as possibilities.
Northrop Frye
Image
The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.
Northrop Frye
Image
Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book, and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.
Northrop Frye
Image
The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
Northrop Frye
Image
The Book of Revelation, difficult as it may be for literalists, becomes much simpler when we read it typologically, as a mosiac of allusions to Old Testament prophecy.
Northrop Frye
Image
Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of
Northrop Frye
Image
Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
Northrop Frye
Image
Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
Northrop Frye
Image
Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.
Northrop Frye
Image
Literature is a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind.
Northrop Frye
Image
We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States, but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It's just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours.
Northrop Frye
Image
To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
Northrop Frye
Image
The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring.
Northrop Frye
Image
No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in religion, magic and social ceremonies.
Northrop Frye
Image
A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
Northrop Frye
Image
Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.
Northrop Frye