Archetypal literary criticism is a type of analytical theory that interprets a text by focusing on recurring myths and archetypes (from the Greek archē, "beginning", and typos, "imprint") in the narrative, symbols, images, and character types in literary works.
As an acknowledged form of literary criticism, it dates back to 1934 when Classical scholar Maud Bodkin published Archetypal Patterns in Poetry.
The Golden Bough (1890–1915), written by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer, was the first influential text dealing with cultural mythologies.
The Golden Bough was widely accepted as the seminal text on myth that spawned numerous studies on the same subject.
Frazer argues that the death-rebirth myth is present in almost all cultural mythologies, and is acted out in terms of growing seasons and vegetation.
The other half of the year Persephone was permitted to be with Demeter in the mortal realm, which represents spring and summer, or the rebirth in the death-rebirth myth.
From a Jungian perspective, myths are the "culturally elaborated representations of the contents of the deepest recess of the human psyche: the world of the archetypes" (Walker 4).
At one time he calls the collective unconscious the "a priori, inborn forms of intuition" (Lietch 998), while in another instance it is a series of "experience(s) that come upon us like fate" (998).
Frye's work helped displace New Criticism as the major mode of analyzing literary texts, before giving way to structuralism and semiotics.
Each season is aligned with a literary genre: comedy with spring, romance with summer, tragedy with autumn, and satire with winter.
Autumn is the dying stage of the seasonal calendar, which parallels the tragedy genre because it is, above all, known for the "fall" or demise of the protagonist.
In his 1949 book Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell pioneered the idea of the ‘monomyth' (though the term was borrowed from James Joyce), a universal pattern in heroic tales across different cultures and genres.
His deep examination of the eight step hero's journey (and the common variations that exist) had a huge impact on the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s, and continues to inspire creative artists today.
But in fact arguments about generic blends such as tragicomedy go back to the Renaissance, and Frye always conceived of genres as fluid.
The best archetypal pattern is any symbol with deep roots in a culture's mythology, such as the forbidden fruit in Genesis or even the poison apple in Snow White.
This archetype may create a shared imaginary which is defined by many stereotypes that have not separated themselves from the traditional, biological, religious and mythical framework.