{"product_id":"secular-scripture","title":"Secular Scripture","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e“The most sophisticated study of popular culture, considered on a world scale, that we have yet had.”—\u003ci\u003eNew Republic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe acclaimed author of \u003ci\u003eAnatomy of Criticism\u003c\/i\u003e on the role of romance as a literary genre in Western culture. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt a time when literary criticism was dominated by close reading of individual works, Northrop Frye’s sweeping, millennia-spanning investigations of the recurring symbols and archetypes that shape our literary traditions made him one of the most influential critics of his generation. Here, Frye brings his encyclopedic knowledge to bear on romance, a genre whose tropes have echoed through Western literature since the Homeric epics.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith its shipwrecks and magic potions, its plots of mistaken identity and the rescue of maidens in distress, romance has often been deemed unworthy of serious critical attention. Critics praise other aspects of \u003ci\u003eThe Odyssey\u003c\/i\u003e or \u003ci\u003eThe Faerie Queene\u003c\/i\u003e, for example, while forgiving the authors’ indulgence in childishly romantic plots. For Frye, however, romance is far more than a puerile form of escapism. Rather, it constitutes a vital mythological universe, a “secular scripture” whose hero is man, paralleling the sacred scripture whose hero is God. Its plot elements—the descent into a lower world or escape into a higher one, the discovery of true identity and the breaking of enchantment, the quest where the end is the beginning transformed—form nothing less than “the structural core of all fiction.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDrawing freely from an enormous range of sources, from Dante and Milton to Lewis Carroll, from fairy tales to dime novels, \u003ci\u003eThe Secular Scripture\u003c\/i\u003e ultimately argues that the Word of God and the word of man are cut from the same cloth. By recovering our own human mythologies, appreciating them in all their artifice, we can, like God in Genesis, look over the vast romance we have created and see that it is good.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Harvard University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54254454145368,"sku":"9780674796768","price":39.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9780674796768_a352dc9a-39a4-4d54-b05a-86c05a448a3a.jpg?v=1778547643","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/secular-scripture","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}