Herman Northrop Frye was a Canadian literary critic and university professor, born on July 14, 1912, in Sherbrooke, Quebec, who wrote extensively on Canadian literature and culture. and he became known as one of the most important literary theorists of the 20th century.
Raised in Moncton, Frye He first came to Toronto to compete in a national typing contest in 1929. He was educated at the University of Toronto, where he studied philosophy and then theology, and was ordained a minister in the United Church of Canada in 1936. He then received a scholarship to undertake postgraduate studies at Merton College, Oxford. He returned to Canada in 1939 and taught at the Victoria College of the University of Toronto. Frye he became chairman of the English department in 1952 and served as director (1959–67) and chancellor (1978–91) of the university. He lectured and taught throughout the United States and Great Britain and around the world.
In 1947 he published Fearful Symmetry: A Study by William Blake, which was a radical and scholarly study of Blake’s visionary symbolism and laid the groundwork for his commitment to literary theory. On Anatomy of Criticism (1957) challenged the hegemony of the New Criticism current, emphasizing the modes and genres of literary texts. Instead of analyzing the language of individual literary works, as the New Critics did, Frye He emphasized the largest or deepest imaginative patterns from which all literary works are built and the recurring importance of the underlying archetypes of literature.
The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society appeared in 1970, and The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, a study of the mythology and structure of the Bible, was published in 1982.
Other critical works by Frye: The Well-Tempered Critic (1963), Secular writing: a study of the structure of romance (1976), Northrop Frye in Shakespeare (1986), and Words with Power: Being a Second Study of The Bible and Literature (1990), similarly emphasize group symbols and myths in literature and the systematic classification of literary symbols, genres, and critiques.