by
Frye, Northrop. 1957.
'The essential element of plot in romance is adventure, which means that romance in naturally a sequential and processional form' (186).
'The complete form of the romance is clearly the successful quest, and such a completed form has three main stages: the stage of the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adventures; the crucial struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either the hero of his foe, or both, must die; and the exaltation of the hero' (187).
'A quest involving conflict assumes two main characters, a protagonist or hero, and an antagonist or enemy' (187).
'We have distinguished myth from romance by the hero's power of action: in the myth proper he is divine, in the romance proper he is human' (188).
'The central form of quest-romance is the dragon-killing theme exemplified in the stories of St. George and Perseus' (189)
'In the Bible we have a sea-monster usually named leviathan, who is described as the enemy of the Messiah, and whom the Messiah is destined to kill in the ''day of the Lord''' (189).
'Now if the leviathan is the whole fallen world of sin and death and tyranny into which Adam fell, it follows that Adam's children are born, live, and die inside his belly' (190).
In the Old Testament the Messiah-figure of Moses leads his people out of Egypt'
'The leviathan is usually a sea-monster, which means metaphorically that he is the sea, and the prophecy that the Lord will hook and land the leviathan in Ezekiel is identical with the prophecy in Revelation that there shall be no more sea' (191)
'Lastly, if the leviathan is death, and the hero has to enter the body of death, the hero has to die, and if his quest is completed the final stage of it is, cyclically, rebirth, and dialectically, resurrection' (192).
'The four mythoi that we are dealing with, comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony, may now be seen as four aspects of a central unifying myth....conflict is the basis or archetypal theme of romance ...catastrophe ... is the archetypal theme of tragedy....the sense that heroism and effective action are absent, disorganized or foredoomed to defeat, and that confusion and anarchy reign over the world, is the archetypal theme of irony and satire....recognition of a newborn society rising in triumph around a still somewhat mysterious hero and his bride, is the archetypal theme of comedy' (192)
'We have spoken of the Messianic hero as a redeemer of society, but in the secular quest-romances more obvious motives and rewards for the quest are more common' (192).
'The quest-romance has analogies to both rituals and dreams' (193).
'The characterization of romance follows its general dialectic structure, which means that subtlety and complexity are not much favored. Characters tend to be either for or against the quest' (195).
'The characters who elude the moral antithesis of heroism and villainy generally are or suggest spirits of nature' (196).
'Romance, like comedy, has six isolatable phases': 1) 'the myth of the birth of the hero'; 2) 'the innocent youth of the hero'; 3) 'the normal quest theme'; 4) 'the maintaining of the integrity of the innocent world against the assault of experience'; 5) 'a reflective, idyllic view of experience from above'; and 6) the end of a movement from active to contemplative adventure' (198-202).
'One important detail in poetic symbolism remains to be considered. This is the symbolic presentation of the point at which the undisplaced apocalyptic world and the cyclical world of nature come into alignment, and which we propose to call the point of epiphany' (203).
'Like comedy, tragedy is best and most easily studied in drama, but it is not confined to drama, nor to actions that end in disaster' (207).
'It is a commonplace of criticism that comedy tends to deal with characters in a social group, whereas tragedy is more concentrated on a single individual' (207).
'In its most elementary form, the vision of law (dike) operates as lex talionis or revenge. The hero provokes enmity, or inherits a situation of enmity, and the return of the avenger constitutes the catastrophe' (208-9).
'All theories of tragedy as morally explicable sooner or later run into the question: is an innocent sufferer in tragedy ... not a tragic figure?
'In irony, as distinct from tragedy, the wheel of time completely encloses the action, and there is no sense of an original contact with a relatively timeless world' (214).
'tragedy usually makes love and the social structure irreconcilable and contending forces' (218).
'The phases of tragedy move from the heroic to the ironic, the first three corresponding to the first three phases of romance, the last three to the last three of irony' (219).
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