This should be read accompanied by Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism. Medieval narrative literature is, in its Mythos, largely allegorical, while the narrative literature of heroic ages is unconsciously anagogical by means of its being in duality with religious texts. But as per Symbols the medieval tradition culminates in the anagogic and monadic, while the heroic age literature disintegrates into the mythical. That is to say that medieval literature consciously strives to comprehend the monadic, while that of the heroic age traverses the opposite direction.