Anatomy of Criticism came out in 1957. About a year after, an old friend of Northrop Frye=s stopped by his office. Confessing to confusion and difficulty over the ideas of the book, he happened to open it at one of the pages in which Frye described the circle of mythoi, Frye=s conception of how literature fitted together with the >myths= of romance, irony, tragedy, and comedy linked in a unified >rotary= vision. At the heart of it was the idea of a circle, divided in four, with each quarter featuring six subdivisions to account for overlapping categories. It was a cosmology, a vision of literature as a totality. Considering its complexity, the circle was compelling. Its basic outline was fairly easy to understand. The friend suggested that if he could establish that, Frye >had it made.= Frye admitted: >At that point, I realized that that really was the centre of the book. And that at the centre was what Jung and his cohorts called the mandala, a circular diagram that anybody at any age could be exposed to= (Denham, 197B98). When Frye reported this in an interview in 1980, he was being a bit disingenuous. The circle wasn=t just a casual idea he happened to slip into the book, which, by good fortune, then went on to carry its weight. It is obvious, from the notebooks and diaries that Frye kept, leading up to the Anatomy, that it always represented a key component of the book. It was, moreover, the product of so many frustrating years of fiddling and of so much active meditation B Frye formulated and sketched out many dozens of complicated tables and mandalas in his notebooks B that he realized that the study of literature could be a kind of kabbalism, a focused speculation about form that could lead, if done correctly, to intellectual and spiritual refinement. Frye=s choice of a circular figure proved fortunate, in that this idea, briefly satisfying him, turned out to have wide communicability. Of his many forms, it could serve as a point of study for others. In fact in the guise of a >circle of stories= it formed the basis for two instructional programs outlined in Glenna Davis Sloane=s The Child as Critic and two of the Fryebased high school readers, Wish and Nightmare and Circle of Stories