Northrop Frye: Cultural Criticism In The Dimension Of Literary Theory

Northrop Frye is an outstanding aesthetician, a literary theorist and a cultural critic in the 20th century Canada and Western world. His life work is quite abundant, but he got the reputation in Europe and America first and foremost by his monumental work Anatomy of Criticism(1957). From a more widespread significance, Northrop Frye is a cultural critic rather than an archetype critic with the structuralism tendency. As a literary theorist, Frye's cultural critical thought can be seen in his works, like Anatomy of Criticism, The Critical Path, The Modern Century and so on.Frye's cultural criticism is in the dimension of literary theory. Frye sticks to literature and strengthens imagination, and he brings modern anthropology, psychology, history and other disciplines into the literary criticism and the cultural criticism domain. He takes the myth as the center, establishes a kind of open, synthetic, whole, dynamic cultural criticism which is independent of other disciplines and simultaneously breaks the fences between the various interior literary critical schools. Frye's cultural criticism does not belong to any school of thoughts or any literary movements. It results from many joint efforts. Canadian culture, Methodism, New Criticism, Oswald Spengler and Carl Gustav Jung have the influence on the production of Northrop Frye's cultural critical theory. Frye's cultural critical thought mainly reflect on the following aspects: Frye sets up a human culture view which take the myth as the center; Frye's popular culture dispels the boundary between the elite culture and the vulgar culture, he proposes the concepts of"the creative art"and"the communicative art", which day by day vanishes the barrier of"main"and"secondary". He emphasizes folk culture and the region culture value, proposes the leisure structure and the education function; Frye also utilizes broad cultural vision and keen cultural insight to the literary critical practice, and he has made the significant contribution to found the Canadian literature and culture. Frye's cultural critical thought has the deep concern, he maintains the balance between human concern and freedom, and links up his road of criticism between the two; Frye has established his synchronic criticism from his attention on moral and religion, while, he has established his diachronic criticism from the attention on the traditional culture and the realistic culture. In concrete critical practice, he units the two; and when concerning culture, he ponders the literature simultaneously. Thus, Frye's criticism concurrently possesses literature and culture; he establishes the sign feature of his cultural criticism.