Final answer:
Archetypal Criticism is the literary stance concerned with understanding the universal patterns that recur in literature, such as the hero or the quest. It unearths deeper meanings in texts by exploring characters, plots, and symbols that are familiar across various cultures and historical periods.
Step-by-step explanation:
Literary Criticism and Archetypal Analysis
The literary criticism stance that examines archetypes such as the hero, the quest, or evil personified is known as Archetypal Criticism. Archetypal criticism focuses on the universal patterns in stories that reflect human experience.
These patterns, or archetypes, show up in the form of characters, plots, and symbols that are recurrent across different cultures and time periods. Noteworthy examples include the trickster figure, such as Coyote in Native American myths, and the journey home narrative, like that of Odysseus.
A common protagonist archetype is the hero, who embodies the moral values of the story's society and typically receives positive regard from the audience.
When critics analyze literature through this lens, they look at how these archetypes function within the story and what they reveal about the human psyche or cultural values.
They might explore the evolution of characters, the tension within the setting, plot development, and narrative point of view to deepen their understanding of the text's archetypal significance.