Though ["The Secular Scripture"] reintroduces the Frye who matters most, the visionary of romance, it is a disappointment. He modestly terms it "a very brief and summary geography lesson" in what he calls "the mythological or imaginative universe." That "or" cunningly contains the kernel of Frye's argument: the mythological and the imaginative are one. As a geographer of myth, Frye is far more persuasive than Jung or Robert Graves, and yet he is a visionary geographer as much as he is a mapper of visions, and so he is as suspect as he is useful.

"Romance," to Frye, has had an unusually broad meaning and at times seemed to absorb or at least contaminate all the other genres, since he used it to mean the whole literary spectrum that lies between "realistic" representation and depictions of the divine world. But, in his current book, it has a narrower...