Archetypes and Archetypal Criticism
Northrop Frye from ‘The Archetypes of Literature’ Archetypal Criticism can be based on the idea, as critic Northrop Frye states, that literature can be seen as a ‘complication of a relatively restricted and simple group of formulas’ that originate from a primitive form of art. Basically, what archetypal criticism proposes is that any work of literature ever made has can be broken down to specific patterns and formulas that are valid in every literary context.
Etymologically, the word ‘archetype’ comes from the Greek “arkhe” which means “first” and “typos” which can be translated as “model”. In the “Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology”, the term “archetype” is defined as ‘original pattern from which copies are made’ . Applied to literature we can understand that all literary works are a different and reorganized variant of a pre-existing form that dates back to primitive times.
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Frazer’s work which focused on myth and ritual. In his book “The Golden Bough” he finds elements of different myths and rituals that are recurrent in legends and ceremonials of different cultures and identities. Swiss psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung, associates archetypes with the ‘collective unconscious’ , which he further calls ‘primordial types (…) universal images that have existed since the remotest times’ . He argued that the experiences of our ancestors survive in this ‘collective unconsciousness’ and later surface in myths, dreams, legends and finally works of