Northrop Fry

"His theory of a historical development of literary modes as a series of displacements of the hero as god originates in his exposition of the seven stages of Albion in The Four Zoas. Frye modulates that sequence into Giambattista Vico's four stages--stories of gods, aristocratic heroes, and the people, followed by a ricorso through chaos back to the beginning--to arrive at the five stages of the development of modes in Western literature in the first essay of Anatomy of Criticism: myth, romance, high mimetic, low mimetic, irony."

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