Northrop Frye’s first book was Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947).
The influential scholar is best known for his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), in which he introduced a critical system based on analysis of literary archetypes.
The archetypal villain Simon Legree first appeared in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) as the brutal degenerate who flogs Tom to death.
The bank employee Joseph K. is arrested for no apparent reason on his thirtieth birthday Kafka’s The Trial.
In October 1849, the forty-year-old writer Edgar Allan Poe was found lying unconscious near a polling place in Baltimore. According to some reports, he had been fed liquor and dragged to various polling places to vote repeatedly. He was taken to a hospital where he remained semicomatose for three days. On October 7, 1849, at…
Shamela’s last name in Henry Fielding’s parody Shamela was also Andrews. The name was used a third time in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), the story of Pamela’s brother, Joseph.
In Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel of the same name, it is the catch that prevents a U.S. Air Force pilot from asking to be grounded on the basis of insanity. A man “would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If…
Derived from the German words Doppel (double) and Ganger (walker), a doppelganger is the personification of another side of a character’s personality. The apparition often represents a demonic side and may herald oncoming death.