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“... the discipline of rhetoric. Reading closely for latent and symbolic meaning in the tradition of Northrop Frye, she turns riddling around and about to see what it is made of and what it can do. Is riddle a genre, a form, a mode, a trope, a masterplot? She wrestles with this range of terms, probing further, for the meanings of ...”

“... scientific reduction, yet it was to be analysed in toughly objective terms. The criticism of Northrop Frye dealt in myth and archetype, but imitated the scientific spirit in its sweeping totalities, rigorous taxonomies and refusal to evaluate. ‘System,’ Roland Barthes once remarked, ‘is the declared enemy of Man.’ He intended the remark as a ...”

“... admits as much. But he must know how few English departments nowadays sail under the colours of Northrop Frye, or concern themselves with ‘close reading’, with what he calls, in a charmingly old-fashioned Cantabrigian moment, ‘practical criticism’. In the 1950s it was just possible for a poet to believe that the English departments would sort ...”

“... not in the great men of the age of literary criticism, like I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis and Northrop Frye, but in what might be called, rather vaguely, the Hazlitt tradition. Yet he is still mildly bothered by the old Intentional Fallacy, and it causes an occasional disturbance of logic: ‘Although writers’ lives are no more than optional extras ...”

“... their own claims, critique shows up their unity (a sacred critical doctrine from Aristotle to Northrop Frye) as something of a sham. It also has an interest in demonstrating how a poem or novel, whatever it may think it’s up to, is unwittingly complicit with political power. What, however, if critique itself were plagued by contradictions? For one ...”

“... an obvious recourse for the lapsed logician, but even more so this farraginous subtype, which, as Northrop Frye wrote, furnishes ‘a good many devices turning on the difficulty of communication’, and treats the ‘diseases of the intellect’ that ‘impede the free movement … of society’. The overturning of formal conventions serves as a ...”

“... the French Marxist, Henri Lefebvre, he is the spokesman of the bourgeoisie; to other critics, from Northrop Frye to Dorothy Coleman, he is a humanist, reviving the tradition of the Menippean satires of Lucian. There are times when the sight of the critics disputing over the Pantagrueline marrow may remind the onlooker of the philosophers portrayed in the ...”

“... The Betrothed by de Sade – and the itinerary is eclectic: Ariosto, Marianne Moore, Fourier, Northrop Frye, Stendahl and Cyrano de Bergerac (the author, not the play). But despite the occasional nature of the items the only one that disappoints is an autobiographical fragment. Calvino stutters when asked to talk about himself, and his way of doing ...”

“... model among the genres is, you guessed it, the Menippean satire, as famously identified by Northrop Frye: in case this should arouse fears from previous misuse, let it be stressed that DeMaria really does something with this categorisation in his subsequent account of the Dictionary. DeMaria shows the book’s voluminous use of illustrative ...”

“... it is useful to the author, serving something like the same purpose as the schemes and cycles of Northrop Frye, as scaffolding, or as a sort of memory theatre, enabling the author to call up the right words and names at the right time. Another instance of this mnemonic habit is Bloom’s celebrated thesis of the Anxiety of Influence. He nailed this ...”

“... of Ancient Mythology (1775) was mentioned once by Blake, and he engraved one of its plates: but Northrop Frye doubted whether he ever read it, and its approaches and conclusions were contrary to his. Comparative mythology was everywhere in the 1790s, and was even the theme of popular compilations such as William Hurd’s A New Universal History of the ...”

“... at the time were engaged in a withdrawal from the New Criticism and in wrestling with the work of Northrop Frye. There was critical analysis of a particularly giddy sort centred on Princeton and, in particular, on the work of Milton Babbitt, whose brilliant sallies on musical structure and syntax, not to mention his public scolding of non-musicological ...”

“... shape around 1950, to be gradually developed by some of the leading Romanticists. For M.H. Abrams, Northrop Frye and Geoffrey Hartman, the date 1798 retains all its charm because it signifies not an echo of 1789 so much as a correction of it – the true spiritual revolution after the false, material and murderous revolution ushered in by 1789. Harold ...”

“... across three centuries, in which Dryden and Addison, Blake and Shelley, Kenneth Burke and Northrop Frye trade insights with contemporary critics. Wittreich wears great learning lightly, and provides a salutary reminder that there is much worth remembering in older criticism; with the weight of Milton bibliography growing by the year, it’s easy ...”

“... fast follow-up suggestion that it’s equally elementary to think all ages are different. Northrop Frye, writing of literature and genre, reminds us that most parents think their children are unique, but take some solace from the fact that they belong to the right species. Borges’s conceptual gag is more upsetting, less conciliatory. It asks us ...”