Editing Northrop Frye (section)

===Influences: Vico and Blake===
[[Giambattista Vico|Vico]], in ''The New Science'', posited a view of language as fundamentally figurative, and introduced into [[Age of Enlightenment|Enlightenment]] discourse the notion of the role of the imagination in creating meaning. For Vico, poetic discourse is prior to philosophical discourse; [[philosophy]] is in fact derivative of [[poetry]]. Frye readily acknowledged the debt he owed to Vico in developing his literary theory, describing him as "the first modern thinker to understand that all major verbal structures have descended historically from poetic and mythological ones" (''Words with Power'' xii).

However, it was [[William Blake|Blake]], Frye's "Virgilian guide" (Stingle 1), who first awakened Frye to the "mythological frame of our culture" <ref name="Cotrupi" /> (Cotrupi 14). In fact, Frye claims that his "second book [''Anatomy''] was contained in embryo in the first [''Fearful Symmetry'']" (''Stubborn Structure'' 160). For it was in reflecting on the similarity between Blake and Milton that Frye first stumbled upon the "principle of the mythological framework," the recognition that "the [[Bible]] was a mythological framework, cosmos or body of stories, and that societies live within a mythology" (Hart 18). Blake thus led Frye to the conviction that the Bible provided Western societies with the mythology which informed all of Western literature. As Hamilton asserts, "Blake's claim that 'the Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art' became the central doctrine of all [Frye's] criticism" (39).  This 'doctrine' found its fullest expression in Frye's appropriately named ''The Great Code'', which he described as "a preliminary investigation of Biblical structure and [[Typology (theology)|typology]]" whose purpose was ultimately to suggest "how the structure of the Bible, as revealed by its narrative and imagery, was related to the conventions and genres of Western literature" (''Words with Power'' xi).