"The fundamental act of criticism is a disinterested response to a work of literature in which all one's beliefs, engagements, commitments, prejudices, stampedings of pity and terror, are ordered to be quiet. We are now dealing with the imaginative, not the existential, with the "let this be," not with "this is," and no work of literature is better by virtue of what it says than any other work."
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The Well-Tempered Critic, p. 140
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Northrop Frye
Herman Northrop Frye (14 July 1912 – 23 January 1991) was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.
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