Frye’s Bible-derived archetypal framework can illuminate avowedly Islamic texts.

Evidence

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. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 502

Categorization

• XREF: A critical-fiction move worth borrowing: reading a non-Western text through an apparently mismatched Western structuralist lens to surface shared patterns. — connects to: Biblical source-criticism techniques inevitably transferred to studying early Islam — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists…, 275; Christian authors framed Islam using pre-existing biblical categories, not firsthand knowledge — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 88; Jewish religious literacy made Islam intuitively legible to Jewish orientalists
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Biblical source-criticism techniques inevitably transferred to studying early Islam — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists…, 275; Christian authors framed Islam using pre-existing biblical categories, not firsthand knowledge — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 88; Jewish religious literacy made Islam intuitively legible to Jewish orientalists