Concept

Archetypal literary criticism

Overview

Archetypal literary criticism is a type of analytical theory that interprets a text by focusing on recurring myths and archetypes (from the Greek archē, "beginning", and typos, "imprint") in the narrative, symbols, images, and character types in literary works. As an acknowledged form of literary criticism, it dates back to 1934 when Classical scholar Maud Bodkin published Archetypal Patterns in Poetry.

Archetypal literary criticism's origins are rooted in two other academic disciplines, social anthropology and psychoanalysis; each contributed to literary criticism in separate ways. Archetypal criticism peaked in popularity in the 1940s and 1950s, largely due to the work of Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye (1912–1991). In the twenty-first century, archetypal literary criticism is no longer widely practiced; there have not been any major recent developments in the field (with the possible exception of biblical literary criticism), but it still has a place in the tradition of literary studies.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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Now for criticism! and first of all for the theoretic attempts. It is not going too far when we say that the ideal had, at that time, escaped out of the world into religion; it scarcely even made its appearance in moral philosophy; of a highest principle of art no one had a notion. They put Gottsched's "Critical Art of Poetry" into our hands; it was useful and instructive enough, for it gave us a historical…
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Autobiography
Close in meaning to Archetypal literary criticism; the term itself is not named.
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Wolf draws our attention to the fact that antiquity was acquainted only with theories of oratory and poetry which facilitated production, [Greek: technai] and _artes_ that formed real orators and poets, "while at the present day we shall soon have theories upon which it would be as impossible to build up a speech or a poem as it would be to form a thunderstorm upon a brontological treatise." Wolf's judgment on the…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, We Philologists
Close in meaning to Archetypal literary criticism; the term itself is not named.
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At the beginning of the process of Greek self-conscious reflection and analysis, the mind ran riot among the concepts and their characters until the contradictions which arose from these unsystematized speculations brought the Greek mind up to the problems of criticism and scientific method. Criticism led to the separation of the many from the one, the imperfect copy from the perfect type, the sensuous and…
John Dewey, Creative Intelligence
Close in meaning to Archetypal literary criticism; the term itself is not named.
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Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Structuralism.

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