Archetype

An archetype is the original pattern other forms copy. The article's literary sense is "a constantly-recurring symbol or motif in literature, painting, or mythology," alongside a broader sense of a prototype or main model that other statements copy, emulate or merge into. The word entered English in the 1540s from Greek archétypos, first-molded, itself from archḗ, beginning, and týpos, pattern or model. Its modern currency comes from the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who around 1919 made archetypes contents of the collective unconscious, innate universal prototypes he described as an explanatory paraphrase of Plato's theory of forms, with the anima and animus, the self, the shadow and the persona among his major figures.

Writers mostly use the word in the literary-craft sense the article also carries: the recurring roles and shapes stories return to. Archetypal criticism holds that a text's meaning is shaped by cultural and psychological myths, and that archetypes help a work win universal acceptance because readers meet the pattern through their social and cultural background. The article's examples span motifs such as the quest and the heavenly ascent, character types from the hero and the trickster to the saint and the martyr, and story archetypes such as Christopher Booker's seven basic plots. This glossary is full of the descendants: the trickster and the everyman are character archetypes, the Byronic hero a named variation on the hero, and a foil is an archetype put to contrast work.