Tale and romance as analysed by literary anthropology: Wishful thinking about reality as a reason for similarities between literary genres

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to analyse, within the paradigm of literary anthropology, the similarities between two literary genres: romance and tale. According to the assumptions provided by Wolfgang Iser and Northrop Frye the article considers fiction — taken as a building block of literature — the linguistic reflection of the natural world, and at the same time, the conceptual framework for the archetypes appearing in the literary work. What, in Frye’s view, both genres have in common is that they present the described world in the mode of comedy, essential to which is that an individual prevails by creating the new reality around him. The comparative analysis of both tale and romance allows one to discover the internal mechanisms of archetypes, which form the intrinsic “logic” of the world given in the literary work.