Anatomy Of Criticism Research Articles

"Critical Inquiry" and the Ideology of Pluralism

This remark from Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism has a rather poignant ring in the 1980s. It calls up a time, the 1950s, when criticism, along with the other social sciences, seemed ready to emancipate itself from ideology, ready to establish itself as an autonomous discipline free from contamination by extrinsic approaches, ready to abandon questions of value and taste in favor of a neutral, systematic, scientific meth-

Entertaining commitments: A reception theory of literary genres

This paper amplifies and modifies Northrop Frye's “theory of myths” (Chapter Three of Anatomy of Criticism) from the vantage point of an esthetics of reception. Two dozen well- known plays serve to illustrate the various combinations of four basic “moods” conveyed by texts and performances to their implied readers and spectators. Comedy combines farcical derision (laugh at) with festive joy (laugh with); tragedy combines melodramatic pity (weep for) with the awe or fear aroused by religious and secular martyr plays (weep along); romance combines fear and joy as it makes us admire the unity of opposites in nature; satire combines derision and pity as it promotes indignation over unresolved contradictions in culture. All texts may, however, be also seen as providing occasions for various combinations of entertainment and commitment. As a useful way of genre-alizing about literature, we may consider a particular work “tragic” or “comic” to the extent that it affords us entertainment through thrill or gratification, and we may consider the same work “satirical” or “romantic” to the extent that it fills us with indignation of admiration, thereby committing us either to change the world or to change ourselves. Far from being generically “pure”, worthwhile texts tend to move their responsive readers in more than one direction; some of them may in fact be described as tragicomedies. But zero degree of entertainment and commitment (that is, boredom and indifference) can result from poor literature as well as poor reception.

The Erotics of Retrospection: Historytelling, Audience Response, and the Strategies of Desire

T _HE RESEMBLANCE between historiography and literature invites contrary interpretations. We may assume that life itself has such qualities as epic breadth and tragic depth and that, therefore, the structure of history has given rise to literary genres. Or else we may assume that all narratives follow the generic patterns of myth and literature and that, therefore, the structures of historiography ultimately stem from the human imagination. I will sidestep the question of temporal priority between stories and histories. Why argue which came first and smash both the chicken and the egg under the spinning wheels of just another history that may turn out to be fiction? Concerning logical priority, however, I wish to suggest that storytellers and historytellers alike are agents of the erotics of retrospection and that, ultimately, similar strategies of desire may determine how we react to the past and act upon the future. A central theme in Hayden White's Metahistory (1973) will serve as my point of departure. This highly stimulating (and highly controversial) book adopts Northrop Frye's map of the literary landscape with its four familiar points of generic compass: tragedy, comedy, romance, and satire. White claims that historians use one of these four types of plot structure as part of their explanatory strategies. As he puts it in a more recent book, Tropics of Discourse (1978), the reader of a historiographical narrative experiences the effect of having the events in the story explained to him . . . when he has perceived the class or type to which the story that he is reading belongs. I think White could have correlated historical and literary works more persuasively if he had tried to explore just how we come to perceive the genre of a particular narrative. In other words, he could-and, I think, should-have pondered the typical audience response to each of the four mythoi or plot structures that he has adopted from Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Now, it is no secret that critics radically disagree about what constitutes the objective generic traits of literary works. Their best hope

Prolegomena to Any Future Criticism Which Shall Claim to Make Sense

No one who has taught the history of criticism, who has contemplated the changes and vicissitudes in theorizing from Aristotle's day to our own, who has seen the mirror become a lamp and sincerity give place to irony is likely to delude himself with the hope that we shall finally settle down to one definitive and permanent framework of literary theory. The most impressive attempt in this line, Northrop Frye's, now seems like a heroic failure; although Anatomy of Criticism began as an attempt to make a final synthesis, it ended as an anthology of brilliant individual insights. Around us we see a chaotic pluralism; the formalists have grown, if not stale, at least venerable, having never quite displaced the historical tradition against which they had reacted; nor do they appear ready to give place to post-structuralism which has moved in from the Continent. There may be, nonetheless, reason to pause for a moment to take stock and to see if there is actually or potentially anything stable in the situation.

Politics and Genre in Nonfiction Prose

I WANT TO CONSIDER a familiar kind of book, and my starting point is Frye's notion, of on which he grounds theory of genres in Anatomy of Criticism. Or rather, he claims to do so, saying that the basis of generic criticism ... is rhetorical, in sense that genre is determined by conditions established between poet and his public. This idea directly sponsors his initial division of literature into four genres. In epos poet recites directly to his audience. In fiction, audience and author are hidden from each other, with book mediating. The poet of drama is concealed, while characters speaking poet's words directly confront audience. By contrast, in lyric radical of presentation, audience is concealed from poet and, as it were, overhears him. Frye's two terms-an author and an audience-and his one two-valued relationship between them-concealment/confrontation-neatly define four main genres.' Fair enough, as an abstract beginning. But Frye breaks off this line of inquiry before long (at least I lose track of it), and when he comes round to discussing specific forms of epos, lyric, drama, and fiction, he pretty much ignores the conditions established between poet and his audience, except for some remarks in section on drama which are among most illuminating of whole essay. There he speaks of audience's status, relative to poet and characters, and of relation of all three to society's history. I wish he had done likewise in discussing other genres, for I suspect that only by being historically and socially specific can one build an understanding of genres on connections between poet and public.2 Perhaps that is why essay on genres seems to many readers least satisfactory in Anatomy. Anyhow, I want to press Frye's initial point somewhat farther, in discussing what I take to be one genre of nonfiction prose. In violation of first rule of genre theory, I won't coin a name for itthough it could be called, by someone with a taste for naming, social

Philosophy of Science and Theory of Literary Criticism: Some Common Problems

Almost since the theories of Einstein and the quantum physicists came into being, a small but significant number of novelists, poets, and playwrights have turned to them for everything from casual metaphors to justification for the philosophies underlying their works. Until fairly recently, however, literary critics have tended to avoid the new physics, finding it uncongenial if not irrelevant. But over the last twenty-five years an increasing number of them, especially critical theorists, have turned to physics and even philosophy of science in the belief that these disciplines offer epistemological and methodological models applicable, to the problems of literary criticism.The primary reason for this increased interest in philosophy of science is the rise of critical formalisms, particularly structuralism and its variants. Structuralism usually regards Russian formalism as its most significant precursor, but Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957) must also be seen as an important forerunner, since it provided formal criticism with a rationale.

The Modes of Fiction: A Plot Morphology

A FEW YEARS AGO a bright student dropped out of my class and out of the university. She felt that she was carrying a basket around in which the English faculty was tossing books, and that it had filled. Some books were dropping off the top and some out the bottom as new books were added, but nothing was coming together. This incident dramatized for me the need to articulate organizations among literary works. My approach has been through plot.l One kind of plot morphology might be a pigeon-hole system with some explicit rationale, a generator of labels and categories. However, to answer our experience of fiction, a morphology must go beyond this. I begin here with labels and categories, and I move to a discussion of the dynamics of plot. For fictional plot is primarily an orderly process in which we participate as readers. A morphology which is true to our experience of fiction can not be static; the labels are finally less important than the attained insight into the ways fiction, as an experience for us as readers, relates to our experience of reality. My starting point is the discussion of the historical modes of fiction in the First Essay of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1957). While I will extend the modal definitions by the end of this essay, I had best begin by recording my understanding of the modes as described by Frye. I take it that Frye's modal discriminators fall into two classes: those which concern the relationship between the fictive universe of a work and our usual reality expectations, and those which concern the nature of the emotional transaction between a reader and a work. Figure 1 is my version of Frye's scheme of modes (exclusive of myth, to which I shall return). I do not mean to deviate from Frye at this point in my descriptions of the emotional and environmental

Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society by Northrop Frye

490 NOTES 1 T.S. Eliot, "What Is Minor Poetry," On Poetry and Poets (London 1957), p 46. 2 Selected Essays (New York 1950), pp 170-71. 3 For example, in the essay "What is Minor Poetry," we find Eliot saying: "We seem, so far to have arrived at the tentative conclusion that, whatever a minor poet may be, a major poet is one the whole of whose work we ought to read, in order fully to appreciate any part of it." On Poetry and Poets, p 4 7 4 Selected Essays, p 179. 5 On Poetry and Poets, p 47. 6 Selected Essays, p 179. 7 T.S. Eliot, Knowledge and Experience in The Philosophy ofF.H. Bradley, edited with notes and A Selected Bibliography by Anne C. Bolgan (London 1964). See especially Eliot's concluding chapter. 8 Selected Essays, p 368. 9 M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York 1971), p 322. 10 Ibid, p 322. 11 Ibid, p 427. 12 In his "Eliot and F.H. Bradley: an account," Wollheim remarks that "Eliot, in the pursuit of a certain kind of security or reassurance that we are in no position to define, was progressively led to substitute, in his mind, on the one hand, ideas of less content for ideas of more content, and, on the other hand, poorer or softer ideas for better and stronger ideas." Eliot in Perspective, ed. Graham Martin (London 1970), p 190. 13 T.S. Eliot, "In Memory of Henry James," The Egoist, 5 (January 1918J, 2. an n e c. bo lgan / University of Western Ontario Northrop Frye, Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976). xviii, 296. $11.5 0 At times I find it pleasant to entertain the perspective by incongruity of an analogy between Northrop Frye's writings since Fearful Symmetry (1947) and Robert Frost's New Hampshire. New Hampshire followed its title poem, an informal cultural-spiritual-critical topology of considerable length, with a series of separate poems called " n o tes" that develop to some length topics suggested in the title poem, these followed in turn by a set of more lyric " grace n o tes." The poem "New Hampshire" originally had literal footnotes to the "notes" and "grace notes" that followed. Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957) has yet to acquire such footnotes, but every reader of Frye's writings will have a growing awareness of the elaborate relation between Frye's central anatomy of our approaches to literary study and his other books of continuous discourse ("notes") and separate essays ("grace notes"). I hope Frye, in whose writings precise musical analogy plays so large a part, might accept these informal analogues for what he has described, in Spiritus Mundi, as a "spiral curriculum, circling around the same issues, though trying to keep them open-ended" (p 100). The following pages will make clear, I trust, that these Frostian analogies are in no way reductive. 4 9 i Frye's most recent note - at the time I am writing - is The Secular Scripture (1976), to be reviewed elsewhere in e s c . His most recent gathering of grace notes is Spiritus Mundi (1976). Frye tells us in his "Preface" that this title was originally suggested for Fables of Identity (1963), implying the thematic and structural continuity of these two collections and an intervening one, The Stubborn Structure (1970). Frye, again in the "Preface," describes the basic pattern of this continuity by dividing the twelve essays that follow into three groups: "general issues related to literary criticism ... general issues within literary criticism itself ... more specific criticism of authors" (p vii). The full sub-titles of the collections of 1963, 1970, and 1976 suggest an exfoliating pattern both synchronic and diachronic or, to use Frye's less cumbersome terms, both a meaning and a narrative. The very title Spiritus Mundi provides a resonant image of the anagogic source or goal of all of Frye's writings, whatever their particular occasion or emphasis. "Part Three: four po ets" takes up single aspects of "authors who have turned up constantly in my writing" (p vii), not surprisingly Milton, Blake, Yeats, and Stevens. In four...

Teaching Foreign Literatures in College: Premises, Problems, Proposals

Few critics or scholars today would seriously dispute the contention that the study of literature significantly differs from the study of language as a tool of communication. Especially since the appearance of important works of literary theory like Rene Wellek and Austin Warren's Theory of Literature (1949) and Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957), it is generally recognized that literary language not only represents the most highly developed and refined form of language, but also differs from everyday language in function, organization, and texture. A work of literature undeniably intends much more than a simple act of communication; and learning to understand and appreciate literature requires a wide variety of skills, only one of which is basic language acquisition.

Northrop Frye: The Critical Passion

My essay on Frye will allow itself a fair measure of personal avowal, because I think such openness with the reader will produce a certain efficiency in communication. I shall never forget my astonishment and delight on reading the 1949 essay, Function of Criticism at the Present Time, which in turn became the Polemical Introduction to Anatomy of Criticism, and my even greater astonishment and delight at the appearance of Towards a Theory of Cultural History (1953), which eventually served as Essay I of the Anatomy, when revised and expanded. The remarkable thing about these articles was not so much their content as their assumption, namely, that criticism could at least try to become a science. This assumption was couched in the form of most general scientific orientations, in that Frye took literature in its own terms,1 to begin with, and then did not prejudicially segregate and then destroy the claims of particular minority groups within the whole commonwealth of literary life. I did not know it at the time, but Frye was then, as now, fighting for a mode of civil rights. He was then, as now, a libertarian. He first made his name writing on Blake-freedom enough, perhaps-but it has always seemed to me that his center is as much Milton as Blake. But then, to know Blake truly is to understand Milton. Before turning to the consequences of Frye's assumption that litera-

The Primacy of Shakespeare

29 DEW Y sermon' piously begins by citing a text from literary gospel of our time, Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism. Shakespeare, we say, was one of a group of English dramatists working around i6oo, and also one of great poets of world, so says Professor Frye. first part of this is a statement of second a value-judgment so generally accepted as to pass for a statement of fact, he goes on. it is not a statement of fact. It remains a value-judgment, and not a shred of systematic criticism can ever be attached to it. This, if we accept it, does not sound very encouraging for systematic criticism. Rightly to begreat, as Shakespeare himself envisaged it, was difficult and could be illusory, though he never ceased to ring changes on that theme. That adjective itself, with its various congeners, has been applied some twenty times by Swiniburne to Victor Hugo, during course of one short article in Encyclopaedia Britannica, would make a good point for Mr. Frye: an argument which might be termed, in Shakespearean phrase, the abuse of greatness. Great in first place, etymologically speaking, had meant something coarse or large, then heavy in particular meaning of pregnant, or, on another plane, noble by virtue of a designated social rank; it was originally an objective and more or less quantitative conception. Greatness in sense of acknowledged preeminence had to come as a later moral refinement, a qualitative and therefore subjective evaluation, yet one arrived at through democratic consensus, and authoritative enough to shape men's lives and claim their persistent attention. If Mr. Frye wants facts-and he does not always-I wish he could be present at this conference. I do not mean simply in order to take part in our discussions, much as these may contribute to critical understanding; but, even more significantly, to speculate on what is presupposed by unique existence of a monumental library primarily devoted to study of a single author whose work forms main concern of a professional body of scholars, now converging to celebrate that work in capital of a foreign country 357 years after his death. The facts of Shakespeare's universal pervasion need scarcely be attested here at Folger Shakespeare Library, of all places. The accumulated bibliography of editions, monographs, articles, and translations, not to mention productions, makes Ossa like a wart. Mr. Frye is well aware of all this, and I suppose he must regard it as an incidental phenomenon of cultural history. But German critics might call it Rezeptionsdsthetik. The fact that Shakespeare furnished more than one out of every eighteen plays for theatrical repertory of Midwestern frontier, as statistically investigated by Ralph L. Rusk, might

Aristotle, Frye, and the Theory of Tragedy

N ORTHROP FRYE has recognized a basic kinship between his Anatomy of Criticism and Aristotle's Poetics. After noting with regret the parochialism of many contemporary critics, he warmly alludes to Aristotle's conception of a totally intelligible structure of knowledge attainable about poetry which is not poetry itself, or the experience of it, but poetics.' This conception, reflected concisely in the opening lines of the Poetics, becomes the program of the Anatomy. Frye, however, aspires to improve on his model by making use of all the relevant doctrines and techniques of criticism developed since Aristotle wrote. Tragedy is the central theme of the Poetics and a subject of major importance in the Anatomy as well. In comparing the two approaches to this genre we are struck by their wide divergence in method and conclusions. Clearly both Aristotle and Frye make profound contributions to our understanding of tragedy but neither succeeds in providing a definitive statement that clarifies the nature of the genre as it has emerged and developed in the western literary tradition. I propose in this paper to assess our current understanding of the nature of tragedy based on the contributions made by Aristotle and Frye and then to suggest a method by which these important theoretical statements can be harmonized to lead us to a fuller understanding of the potentialities and boundaries of the genre. The major tenets of Aristotle's theory of tragedy are well known. I summarize them here for later comparison with Frye. For Aristotle tragedy is an imitation (mimesis) of actions involving the pitiable and fearful dimensions of human existence. This form of imitation repre-

Toward a Syntax of Fiction

THE THEORY OF FICTION, to give it its common if somewvhat inflated designation, has developed into one of the major industries of English and American criticism of the last decade. After a long period during which Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction (1921) more or less dominated theoretical or quasi-theoretical discussions of the novel, and most other studies consisted either of disjunctive essays in individual explication (as in the work of R. P. Blackmur or Dorothy Van Ghent), or historical panoramas of varying proportions of fact and evaluation (as with Arnold Kettle or Walter Alien), the mid-1950's saw a resurgence of interest in the deep-structure properties of the fictive act itself which continues to produce a variety of systems and approaches whose excitement is not diminished by their frequent partiality. Such books as Northrop Fryes' Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), W. J. Harvey's Character and the Novel (1965), and Robert Scholes' and Robert Kellogg's The Nature of Narrative (1966) represent important contributions to a new

An Essay on Critical Method, Applied to the Comedia

M Y PURPOSE HERE IS, first of all, to urge that a more modern and relevant approach to Comedia criticism is desirable, specifically one that will offer a realistic perspective on the relationship between traditional scholarship and modern literary criticism; second, to advocate greater critical rigor, which will encompass eschewing the intentional fallacy, hierarchies, cults of personality, biographical and cultural determinism, and moralizing; and, finally, to insist on the autonomy of the critic and on viewing criticism as a cumulative enterprise. When I speak of critics and criticism here and 'throughout, I have in mind academic critics and academic criticism; that is, the type of literary criticism practiced in the academy. A distinction needs to be made between -the academic critic's role when he deals with primary source material and when he writes reviews. In the latter capacity, he will almost invariably reach some conclusion concerning the value of the secondary source material being reviewed. In -the role of reviewer, he functions much like the drama and film critics who review current offerings in those areas. In reviews, of whatever kind, relatively subjective and negative criticism tends to flourish. In literary cri'ticism, the task should always be viewed and the criticism expressed in objective and consistently positive terms. Let me summarize briefly the current situation. With the exception of those of the British School who have been influenced at least indirectly by I. A. Richards' Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), it is clear that the majority of Comedia scholars are precisely that: scholars, rather than literary critics.' Among American Comediantes, a disproportionate amount of energy has traditionally been devoted to activities marginal to 'the explication of the literary artifact; specifically, to editing, biography, bibliography, staging, questions of influence and authorship, and preoccupation with antiquarianism and extrinsic concerns in general.2 The second truly significant book of this century, in point of its influence upon critical theory, has been largely ignored by those who publish on Golden-Age drama, and indeed by Hispanists at large. I refer to Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957). There have been a few attempts at interpretation based on myth and archetype, but these have looked more directly to Jung, or perhaps Frazer, than to Frye; in other words, they look more to psychology and anthropology than to the myths and archetypes of literature itself. There have also been a few Freudian and Marxist interpretations, but, except for Noel Salomon's work, none of the lot has been particularly productive or convincing. The point I would make is the obvious one that we are, in the majority, at some distance from the mainstream of modern critical theory and

On the Interpretation of Drama

HERE is a pronounced tendency in modern criticism to deny literary works their generic consistency. One can recognize without too much trouble whether a critical essay is written by a psychologist, sociologist, philosopher, or a linguist; but if we do not already know in advance the genre is under discussion, we cannot decide without difficulty whether he is speaking of a novel, a drama, or a lyric. The question of critical method seems to have pushed aside the question of form, or to be more exact, the question of the mode of existence of a literary work. We discover, says Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism, that the critical theory of genres is stuck precisely where Aristotle left it. In spite of the abundance of critical discussion about literature, we still lack studies of the novel, drama (and even lyric poetry) can match the studies of the epic by Millman Parry, Albert B. Lord, and C. S. Lewis. With the partial exception of the pioneering book by Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theater, the modern critic presents literature to us-if we can put it this way-in a crumbled state, like a flow of words, or pictures, or psychological complexes, or social attitudes, connected among themselves in one way or another; but the moment all these fragments become one literary creation remains unperceived. Or, dans la mesure oi la psychocritique cesse de decrire son object pour tenter de 1'expliquer, says Serge Doubrovsky in his study Pourquoi la nouvelle critique, volatilise. Elle n'approfondit pas les structures qu'elle decouvre, elle les d6truit . . . . Ce que nous vivons, ce ne sont pas les hesitations de Pyrrhus oi0 les ardeurs de Phedre, c'est le long cauchemar primitif et indiffkrenci6 de Racine. What was said of the psychoanalytic criticism of drama-which entirely overlooks the fact both Phaedra and Andromaque are dramas and not lyrics-is equally valid for the majority of other critical methods we know: generally

Rhetoric, Black Power, and Baldwin's "Another Country"

This piece is rhetorical criticism. That statement may doom the writer at the outset to an absurd posture. Criticism suggests detachment, but the subject is one that mocks such an attitude. Further, striking the critical stance may be innately arrogant and, surely in the searing gospels of the American ghettos even more than in those of yore, does a haughty spirit go before destruction. Nonetheless, the stance is struck. In discussing Anatomy of Criticism, Lawrence Rosenfield (1968: 51-52) uses a game analogy. The critic is the ideal spectator. He gives an account of what he sees and renders a judgment of it. The analogy is undoubtedly telling. Description and evaluation both depend on understanding. But understanding is never absolute. It reveals a point of view. Even if the viewer shifts his position from time to time, like a man walking around a piece of sculpture trying to see it from every angle, at each moment he sees from inside his own skin. There is no other possibility. Each statement reveals where he's at-at the moment.

The Function of Northrop Frye at the Present Time

Revolutionary action, of whatever kind, leads to the dictatorship of one class, and the record of history seems clear that there is no quicker way to destroy the benefits of culture. If we attach our vision to the conception of ruler morality, we get Matthew Arnold's culture of barbarians; if we attach it to the conception of a proletariat we get Arnold's culture of the populace; if we attach it to any kind of bourgeois Utopia, we get the culture of philistinism. It seems better to get clear of all such conflicts, attaching ourselves to Arnold's other axiom that culture seeks to do away with classes. The ethical purpose of a liberal education is to liberate, which can only mean to make one capable of conceiving society as free, classless and urbane. No such society exists, which is one reason why a liberal education must be deeply concerned 'with works of imagination. The imaginative element in works of art lifts them clear of the bondage of history. Anything that emerges from the total experience of criticism to form part of a liberal education becomes, by virtue of that fact, part of the emancipated and humane community of culture, vwhatever its original reference. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

American Fiction and the Genre Critics

The question of what is unique about nineteenth-century American fiction is asked and answered with such compulsive regularity in academic circles that by all logic its possibilities should be exhausted. Yet the opposite is true. Since the end of World War II even the most far reaching studies have done as much to obscure as to clarify the problem. They have dealt with symptoms rather than causes and have never adequately shown how nineteenth-century American fiction can be distinguished from English fiction of the same period. The common source of confusion is the critical theory that the differences between these fictions are differences in genre and that by dividing American fiction into romances and English fiction into novels we increase our understanding of the two traditions. This view originates in Lionel Trilling's essays, Manners, Morals, and the and Art and Fortune, receives its most direct expression in Richard Chase's The American Novel and its Tradition, and is implicit in Marius Bewley's The Eccentric Design. It rests on two major descriptive points. First, American writers, in contrast to English writers, have not used social observation to achieve their profoundest effects but have sought a reality tangential to society. Second, in subject matter and in presentation the American romance, unlike the English novel, is not bound by the ordinary and veers toward myth, allegory, and symbolism. As theoretical distinctions between the romance and the novel, these concepts are not unique to the genre critics. They are used by Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism and by Scott and Hawthorne. In an Essay on Romance written in 1823 for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Scott observed:

An Anatomy of Musical Criticism

An Anatomy of Musical Criticism

Our New Poet: Archetypal Criticism and The Faerie Queene

AbstractWhen the archetypal principles outlined by Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism have been applied to The Faerie Queene, they have dangerously misrepresented its structure and meaning. The Anatomy subordinates a poet's intention in any given text to the symbolic patterns a critic can discover there; and so it arbitrarily describes Spenser's poem as a romance in six books, covering many of the six phases which make up the archetypal plot of that genre. In a later essay Frye amends his scheme to include the Mutabilitie Cantos as a completed seventh part in the unified imagery of the whole. But the reductive possibilities of his approach are far more fully realized in A. C. Hamilton's Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene. Around the poem Hamilton weaves a network of recurring “images”: puns, sexual allusions, and mythological equivalents. He also forces it into various larger molds, asserting that Book One consists of two five-act plays, a tragedy followed by a comedy; that Book One falls into four parts which outline the remaining books; and that the seven books which survive are patterned on the chronological development of human life. Thus, archetypal criticism has made Spenser over into another poet.