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[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.

Northrop Frye

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Northrop Frye
Age: 78 †
Born: 1912
Born: July 14
Died: 1991
Died: January 23
Cleric
Literary Critic
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Tendencies
Myth
Romance
Fiction
Strong
Science
Mode
Tendency
Inherent

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Americans like to make money Canadians like to audit it. I don't know of any other country where the accountant enjoys a higher social and moral status.
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We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.
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The tremendous efficiency and economy of the book has once again demonstrated itself. It's the world's most patient medium.
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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.
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It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question Who am I? than by some such riddle as Where is here?
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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.
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Everything that happens in the Old Testament is a type or adumbration of something that happens in the New Testament, and the whole subject is therefore called typology, though it is a typology in a special sense.
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To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
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The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.
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Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
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We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.
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The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
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Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.
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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.
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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
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Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.
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Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns.
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Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.
Northrop Frye
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In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
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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