Northrop Frye (1912-1991), "Reconsidering Levels of Meaning," in his
Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007 =
Collected Works of Northrop Frye, 25), pp. 303-326 (at 303):
A student of English literature who doesn't know the Bible doesn't know
what is going on in English literature.
Frye,
The Educated Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), pp. 110-111:
The most complete form of this myth is given in the Christian Bible, and
so the Bible forms the lowest stratum in the teaching of literature. It should
be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of
the mind, where everything that comes along later can settle on it. That, I
am aware, is a highly controversial statement, and can be misunderstood in
all kinds of ways, so please remember that I'm speaking as a literary critic
about the teaching of literature. There are all sorts of secondary reasons for
teaching the Bible as literature: the fact that it's so endlessly quoted from
and alluded to, the fact that the cadences and phrases of the King James
translation are built into our minds and way of thought, the fact that it’s full
of the greatest and best known stories we have, and so on. There are also
the moral and religious reasons for its importance, which are different
reasons. But in the particular context in which I'm speaking now, it's the
total shape and structure of the Bible which is most important: the fact that
it's a continuous narrative beginning with the creation and ending with the
Last Judgement, and surveying the whole history of mankind, under the
symbolic names of Adam and Israel, in between. In other words, it's the
myth of the Bible that should be the basis of literary training, its imaginative
survey of the human situation which is so broad and comprehensive that
everything else finds its place inside it. Remember too that to me the word
myth, like the words fable and fiction, is a technical term in criticism, and
the popular sense in which it means something untrue I regard as a debasing
of language.