Recommended by Peter Sacchio in his Shakespeare lectures for the Teaching Company. I found it slow going, but it is not really a focal interest for me.

One of the twentieth century's great works of literary criticism, Anatomy is the key text on myth-based reading. ( )

It's no exaggeration to say that this is one of the books of criticism that changed my (intellectual) life. Though its vein of Structuralism has largely been supplanted by Deconstruction (as have other veins of Structuralism), and though its theories are no longer fashionable, the Anatomy of Criticism stands out as being one of the finest overarching theories of literary genres ever.

Frye is different from most Structuralists, in a chicken and the egg sense. The founders of Structuralism believed in a Jungian collective unconcious which served to generate certain literary and narrative modes across all cultures at all times. Frye believed the reverse: that initial narrative modes had impressed themselves upon the literary unconcious, thereby causing themselves to be replicated. So which came first, the narrative forms or the unconcious drives? That question lies at the heart of the divide between the Canadian Frye and the French.

But it hardly matters, in a practical sense. What Frye proposes, over four long essays, is a massive expansion of Aristotle's Poetics, ranging from the mythical to the absurd, from tragedy and comedy to satire, and everywhere in between.

Though his schemes are a bit too schematic at times, and though it feels at certain moments that he is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole (especially in the essay on narrative arcs), his overall theory is if not entirely persuasive then at least an excellent way to begin thinking about literary genres, to see the continuities in literature. And once the continuities can be seen more clearly, the differences can more easily be brought into relief. ( )