Archetypal literary analysis can attend to historical and ideological circumstances
Evidence
Edward Said, for example, has criticized formalist approaches such as Frye’s as being based on an idea of an essential “man doing service as the embodiment of a Judeo-Christian Eurocentric norm” and eschewing the historical and ideological circumstances shaping genres and texts (Humanism and Democratic Criticism [New York: Columbia University Press, 2003], 39). Although the notion of archetypes seems to lend itself to transcendent models and dehistoricized abstraction, I am arguing here that this need not be the case. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 964
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Defines the methodological stance: archetypes need not be dehistoricized, contra Said — a tool for the reader’s close reading.