Editing Northrop Frye (section)

===A theory of the imagination===
Once asked whether his critical theory was [[Romanticism|Romantic]], Frye responded, "Oh, it's entirely Romantic, yes" (Stingle 1). It is Romantic in the same sense that Frye attributed Romanticism to Blake: that is, "in the expanded sense of giving a primary place to imagination and individual feeling" (Stingle 2). As artifacts of the imagination, literary works, including "the pre-literary categories of [[ritual]], [[mythology|myth]], and [[Folklore|folk-tale]]" (''Archetypes'' 1450) form, in Frye's vision, a potentially unified imaginative experience. He reminds us that literature is the "central and most important extension" of [[mythology]]: "...&nbsp;every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature" (''Words with Power'' xiii). Mythology and literature thus inhabit and function within the same imaginative world, one that is "governed by conventions, by its own modes, symbols, myths and genres" (Hart 23).  Integrity for criticism requires that it too operates within the sphere of the imagination, and not seek an organizing principle in ideology. To do so, claims Frye,
<blockquote>...&nbsp;leaves out the central structural principles that literature derives from myth, the principles that give literature its communicating power across the centuries through all ideological changes. Such structural principles are certainly conditioned by social and historical factors and do not transcend them, but they retain a continuity of form that points to an identity of the literary organism distinct from all its adaptations to its social environment (''Words with Power'' xiii).</blockquote>

Myth therefore provides structure to literature simply because literature as a whole is "displaced mythology" (Bates 21).{{Citation needed|reason=Who is Bates? Only referred to once and not in bibliography.|date=February 2020}} Hart makes the point well when he states that "For Frye, the story, and not the argument, is at the centre of literature and society. The base of society is mythical and narrative and not ideological and dialectical" (19). This idea, which is central in Frye's criticism, was first suggested to him by [[Giambattista Vico]].