Christian and Islamic narratives share mythic structures that span traditions

Evidence

One way of apprehending this appeal is to revisit the work of Northrop Frye, the distinguished twentieth-century Canadian critic famous for his development of archetypal criticism. Frye’s career is informed by a sense of the persistence in Western literature of primitive formulas in repeated metaphors and plot devices in canonical texts. Drawing on Giambattista Vico and William Blake, Frye recognizes that literary structures develop from ancient poetic and mythological archetypes and share some of their formal preoccupations and qualities. In particular, he identifies the Bible as the source of the mythological framework for Western literature. This explicitly Christian heritage might make Frye seem an unlikely filter through which to approach Leila Aboulela’s avowedly Islamic text. However, his general points about mythological structures as well as some of the formal features he identifies serve to open a different way of looking at Minaret, one that acknowledges continuities among Christian, Islamic, and secular narrative paradigms. Of particular interest is the notion of a “mythological universe,” which Frye calls “a vision of reality in terms of human concerns, hopes and anxieties.” Such a vision is fed and takes its shape from the narrative body of religious and historical revelation through which a society comes to understand itself. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 502

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Frye’s notion of a ‘mythological universe’ — a narrative framework through which a society understands itself.
• XREF: Frye’s archetypal criticism gives the reader a critical vocabulary bridge: Aboulela’s Islamic text shares Christian mythic structure, paralleling how Naqvi and Hamid might be read across paradigms.
• SEED: Could ground an essay arguing that Islamophobic vs. contesting fiction turns on which mythological frame each novel draws on.