Frye consciously omits all specific and practical criticism, instead offering classically inspired theories of modes, symbols, myths and genres, in what he termed "an interconnected group of suggestions."

The literary approach proposed by Frye in Anatomy was highly influential in the decades before deconstructivist criticism and other expressions of postmodernism came to prominence in American academia circa 1980s.

If taste succumbs entirely to such social forces, the result is the same as that of consciously adopting an external ideology described above.

Literary criticism ought to be a systematic study of works of literature, just as physics is of nature and history is of human action.

Frye's systemization of literature begins with three aspects of poetry given by Aristotle in his Poetics: mythos (plot), ethos (characterization/setting), and dianoia (theme/idea).

The first essay begins by exploring the different aspects of fiction (subdivided into tragic and comic) in each mode and ends with a similar discussion of thematic literature.

He speculates that contemporary fiction may be undergoing a return to myth, completing a full circle through the five modes.

Frye argues that when irony is pushed to extremes, it returns to the mode of myth; this concept of the recursion of historical cycles is familiar from Giambattista Vico[3] and Oswald Spengler.

Frye next introduces the formal phase, embodied by the image, in order to define the layer of meaning that results from the interplay of the harmony and rhythm of the signs and motifs.

The notion of form (and perhaps Frye's literal phase) relies heavily on the assumption of inherent meaning within the text—a point contested by deconstructionist critics.

Frye argues that convention is a vital part of literature and that copyright is harmful to the process of literary creation.

Frye points to the use of convention in Shakespeare and Milton as examples to strengthen his argument that even verbatim copying of text and plot does not entail a death of creativity.

The anagogic level of medieval allegory treated a text as expressing the highest spiritual meaning.

Frye makes the argument that not only is there a lateral connection of archetypes through intertextuality, but that there is a transcendent almost spiritual unity within the body of literature.

At one pole we have apocalyptic imagery which typifies the revelation of heaven and ultimate fulfillment of human desire.

The divine is an angry, inscrutable God demanding sacrifice, the human is the tyrannical anti-Christ, the animal is a predator such as a lion, the vegetable is the evil wood as found at the beginning of Dante's Inferno or Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown", and the city is the dystopia embodied by Orwell's 1984 or Kafka's The Castle.

(as described in Great Chain of Being by Aristotle) (heavenly) (hellish) Innocence Experience Nature & Reason leaders with evil ego unicorn, Phoenix (applied to city) city of God wasteland sea-storm, whirlpool, snow (salty, polluted sea) Finally we have the analogical imagery, or more simply, depictions of states that are similar to paradise or hell, but not identical.

Frye then identifies the mythical mode with the apocalyptic, the ironic with the demonic, and the romantic and low mimetic with their respective analogies.

This ordering allows Frye to place the modes in a circular structure and point to the cyclical nature of myth and archetypes.

The remainder of the chapter deals with the cycle of the four seasons as embodied by four mythoi: comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony or satire.

Rhetorical criticism, then, is the exploration of literature in the light of melos, opsis, and their interplay as manifested in lexis.

Difference in genre relies not on topical considerations (science fiction, romance, mystery), nor in length (e.g. epics are long, lyrics are short), but in the radical of presentation.

He contends that the common usage of the term is inaccurate for purposes of criticism, drawn from analogy with harmony, a stable relationship.

The original presentation of the epic was ta epe (that which is spoken), and when an author, speaker, or storyteller addresses a visible audience directly, we have epos.

In this essay, the term refers to literature in which the author addresses the audience through a book, or more simply stated, prose.

The lyrical rhythm is very clearly seen in Joyce's Finnegans Wake, a work based almost entirely on associative babbles and dream utterance.

Spengler's sense of a historically finite culture, exploiting and exhausting a certain range of imaginative possibilities, provided the basis for the conception of modes outlined in the first essay of Anatomy of Criticism.