Traditional Culture And Poetic Wisdom

With the introduction of Frye's Mythical-archetypal Criticism came to China from last century, this theory was researched deeply and experts had diversification of understandings .And there is a dilemma if Mythical-archetypal Criticism is practiced into Chinese literature, the reason is Frye's theory has a specific background, which is the western literary tradition: the Bible. As the origin of all the imaginations of human being, and as a Literature of the Bible, the Bible has not much relations with both Catholicism and the Obscurant of Middle ages, it is a systemic myth existed as a literary works, and also it is the carrier of two core conceptions: myth and archetype. The attempt of the thesis is to offer a humanistic orientation to Frye's theory by probing into the relation of the Bible and his theory.Enlightened by William Black's poems about the Bible and the theory of Jung's archetype, Frye embarked on his macroscopical critical theory by thinking about the relation between all literature and the Bible.When the thesis talk about who is the really teacher of Frye,a majority of them will think Jung because of his famous conception of archetype.But in my opinion,it is through the influence of Black's literary practice that Frye obtained the first thinking of what was the origin of archetype,it was the Bible. In another more important sense,myth and archetype are two conceptions that run through all Frye'scritical thoughts, they two is enough to sketch the development of his critical thoughts,and also the two conceptions are all mean the Bible at the same time: archetype is the theory itself and myth is the narrate. So the religionary meaning of the Bible is suspended in Frye's theory,it only means the literary archetype:the origin of all literary imaginations of human being.Without the Bible,we definitely can not understand Frye's theory completely.From the tight relation of the Bible as a literature and Frye's theory,it is not appropriate to rank his theory into structuralism or formalism, it is more comprehensive to describe it as a humanistic theory.