Northrop Frye
For Frye, archetype means a primordial image, a part of the collective unconscious, the psychic residue of numberless experience of the same kind, and thus part of the inherited response-pattern of the race (Literary Criticism, 709)
Frye’s theory suggests how powerfully myth can organize our thinking about literature and about culture.
Frye suggests a conceptual means of drawing individual and apparently related archetypal images - - the fundaments of psyche and culture- - into a coherent and ultimately hierarchical framework of ‘mythoi’, one organizing not only individual literary works but the entire system of literary works, that is, literature.
His 4 mythoi or generic narratives (spring: comedy; summer: romance; autumn: tragedy; winter: irony and satire) have proved central in the ongoing project of genre theory.