Highlighting aspects of his scholarship seldom given sufficient emphasis, this new volume of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye documents Frye's writings on the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (apart from those on William Blake, which are featured in other volumes). The volume includes Frye's seminal 1956 essay "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility" and the highly influential 1968 book A Study of English Romanticism. With these pieces and the other published and unpublished works contained in the volume, Frye changed the way the transition from the major Augustan figures to the Romantics was viewed. These works are a central part of Frye's long and radical rethinking of the relation of romance and Romanticism and, through them, he emerges as a meticulous textual critic, teasing out the fine brushstroke effects in writers as varied as Boswell and Beddoes, Dickens and Dickinson. Imre Salusinszky's introduction and annotation illuminates Frye's writing and guides the reader along the path of Frye's five-decade development of thought on Romanticism. This volume is an invaluable contribution to studies on Frye, as well as to Romantic and Victorian literature.
Here is a specialized dictionary of quotations based on the thoughts and writings of a single person. It is evidence that there is a Canadian writer of whom it may be said that we as his readers can grow up inside his work "without ever being aware of a circumference."
"This volume brings together Northrop Frye's criticism on twentieth-century literature, a body of work produced over almost sixty years. Including Frye's incisive book on T.S. Eliot, as well as his discussions of writers such as James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and George Orwell, the volume also contains a recently discovered review of C.G. Jung's book on the synchronicity principle and a previously unpublished introduction to an anthology of twentieth-century literature. Frye's insightful commentaries demonstrate that he was as astute a critic of the literature of his own time as he was of the literature of earlier periods." "Glen Robert Gill's introduction delineates the development of Frye's criticism on twentieth-century literature, puts it in historical and cultural context, and relates it to his overarching theory of literature. This definitive volume in the Collected Works will be a welcome addition to the libraries of Frye specialists and of scholars and students of twentieth-century literature in general."--BOOK JACKET.
Eminent Northrop Frye scholar Robert D. Denham explores the connection between Frye and twelve writers who influenced his thinking but about whom he didn’t write anything expansive. Denham draws especially on Frye’s notebooks and other previously unpublished texts, now available in the Collected Works of Frye. Such varied thinkers as Aristotle, Lewis Carroll, Søren Kierkegaard, and Paul Tillich emerge as important figures in defining Frye’s cross-disciplinary interests. Eventually, the twelve “Others” of the title come to represent a space occupied by writers whose interests paralleled Frye’s and helped to establish his own critical universe.
Explores the value and uses of literature in our time. Dr. Frye offers ideas for the teaching of literature at lower school levels, designed both to promote an early interest and to lead the student to the knowledge and experience found in the study of literature.
This book examines the transformation of the figure of the stranger in the literature of the modern age in terms of liminality. As a ‘spectral monster’ that has a paradoxical and liminal relationship to both the sacred and the secular, the figure of the modern stranger has played a role in both adapting and shaping a culturally determined understanding of the self and the other. With the advent of modernity, the stranger, the monster, and the spectre became interconnected. Haunting the edges of reason while also being absorbed into ‘normal’ society, all three, together with the cyborg, manifest the vulnerability of an age that is fearful of the return of the repressed. Yet these figures can also become re-appropriated as positive symbols, able to navigate between the dangerous and chaotic elements that threaten society while serving as precarious and ironic symbols of hope or sustainability. The book shows the explanatory potential of focusing on the resacralizing – in a paradoxical and liminal manner – of traditionally sacred concepts such as ‘messianic’ time and the ‘utopian,’ and the conflicts that emerged as a result of secularized modernity’s denial of its own hybridization. This approach to modern literature shows how the modern stranger, a figure that is both paradoxically immersed and removed from society, deals with the dangers of failing to be re-assimilated into mainstream society and is caught in a fixed or permanent state of liminality, a state that can ultimately lead to boredom, alienation, nihilism, and failure. These ‘monstrous’ aspects of liminality can also be rewarding in that traversing difficult and paradoxical avenues they confront both traditional and contemporary viewpoints, enabling new and fresh perspectives suspended between imagination and reality, past and future, nature and artificial. In many ways, the modern stranger as a figure of literature and the cultural imagination has become more complicated and challenging in the (post)modern contemporary age, both clashing with and encompassing people who go beyond simply the psychological or even spiritual inability to blend in and out of society. However, while the stranger may be altering once again the defining or essentializing the figure could result in the creation of other sets of binaries, and thereby dissolve the purpose and productiveness of both strangeness and liminality. The intention of “Monstrous Liminality” is to trace the liminal sphere located between the secular and sacred that has characterized modernity itself. This space has consequently altered the makeup of the stranger from something external, into a figure far more liminal, which is forced to traverse this uncanny space in an attempt to find new meanings for an age that is struggling to maintain any.
More than fifty years after the publication of Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye remains one of Canada's most influential intellectuals. This reappraisal reasserts the relevance of his work to the study of literature and illuminates its fruitful intersection with a variety of other fields, including film, cultural studies, linguistics, and feminism. Many of the contributors draw upon the early essays, correspondence, and diaries recently published as part of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye series, in order to explore the development of his extraordinary intellectual range and the implications of his imaginative syntheses. They refute postmodernist arguments that Frye's literary criticism is obsolete and propose his wide-ranging and non-linear ways of thinking as a model for twenty-first century readers searching for innovative ways of understanding literature and its relevance to contiguous disciplines. The volume provides an in-depth examination of Frye's work on a range of literary questions, periods, and genres, as well as a consideration of his contributions to literary theory, philosophy, and theology. The portrait that emerges is that of a writer who still has much to offer those interested in literature and the ways it represents and transforms our world. The book's overall argument is that Frye's case for the centrality of the imagination has never been more important where understanding history, reconciling science and culture, or reconceptualizing social change is concerned.
The widespread opinion is that Northrop Frye’s influence reached its zenith in the 1960s and 1970s, after which point he became obsolete, his work buried in obscurity. This almost universal opinion is summed up in Terry Eagleton’s 1983 rhetorical question, "Who now reads Frye?" In The Reception of Northrop Frye, Robert D. Denham catalogues what has been written about Frye – books, articles, translations, dissertations and theses, and reviews – in order to demonstrate that the attention Frye’s work has received from the beginning has progressed at a geomantic rate. Denham also explores what we can discover once we have a fairly complete record of Frye’s reception in front of us – such as Hayden White’s theory of emplotments applied to historical writing and Byron Almén’s theory of musical narrative. The sheer quantity of what has been written about Frye reveals that the only valid response to Eagleton’s rhetorical question is "a very large and growing number," the growth being not incremental but exponential.
