This book brings together letters from 89 of Northrop Frye's students, friends, and acquaintances in which they record their recollections of him as a teacher and a person during the 1940s and 1950s. A number of the correspondents also provide their impressions of Victoria College at the time, where Frye taught for more than 50 years. The letters provide insights into Frye as a teacher that are not elsewhere available, and reveal a consistent portrait of an intellectually superlative, generous, and thoughtful man.
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.
The great Canadian literary critic and humanist Northrop Frye taught at Victoria College, University of Toronto, for fifty-three years. Remembering Northrop Frye (2011) brought together letters from eighty-nine of Frye’s students and friends in which they recorded their recollections of him as a teacher during the 1940s and 1950s. However, these students provided very few accounts of what Frye actually said in the classroom. Outside of the video recordings of Frye’s course in the English Bible, this book, a transcription of fifteen sets of notes taken by Northrop Frye’s students in the late 1940s and early 1950s, is the only available extended record of the content of Frye’s courses. For all those who wish that they could have sat in one or more of Frye’s classes, the present collection of notes will at least partially fulfill that wish. One can now attend, as it were, fifteen of Frye’s classes without having to pay tuition.
The Reception of Northrup Frye takes a thorough accounting of the presence of Frye in existing works and argues against Frye's diminishing status as an important critical voice.
Robert D. Denham pursues his quest to uncover the links between Northrop Frye and writers and others who directly influenced his thinking but about whom he did not write an extensive commentary. The first chapter is about Frye’s reading of Patanjali, the founder of the philosophy of Hindu yoga, while the second, discusses cultural mythographer Giambattista Vico, literary history and poetic language. The focus of Frye’s criticism was the verbal arts, but he also had an abiding interest in both the visual arts and music; hence Frye’s admiration of J.S. Bach. The essay on Tolkien examines the tendency in literary history to return from irony to myth, as well as the role that Tolkien played in Frye’s fiction-writing fantasies. In subsequent chapters, Denham explores Frye’s preference for romance and his critique of realism, which run parallel to the views of Oscar Wilde, and their strong shared convictions about the centripetal thrust of art, and about criticism being as creative as literature. Frye’s appreciation for Whitehead’s concept of interpenetration in Science in the Modern World became a key feature of Frye’s speculations about the highest reaches of literature and religion. Frye is clearly indebted to Martin Buber, particularly his influential meditation I and Thou. Aristotle, an important influence upon Frye, was partially filtered through R.S. Crane and his The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry. Finally, the relationship between Frye and his Oxford tutor Edmund Blunden are explored, while the last is an essay on Frye and M.H. Abrams on how Frye’s critical project might be viewed developed in Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp. This book is published in English. - Robert D. Denham poursuit son examen d’écrivains et autres influences qui ont marqué l’éminent critique Northrop Frye, mais sur lesquels celui-ci n’avait pas consacré de réflexions très développées. Le premier chapitre porte sur la lecture que fait Frye de Patanjali, le fondateur de la philosophie du yoga hindou, et le deuxième, sur le mythographe culturel Giambattista Vico, l’histoire littéraire et le langage poétique. Frye s’intéressait aux arts visuels et à la musique et Denham approfondit l’influence de J.S. Bach sur Frye. Le chapitre sur Tolkien porte sur la tendance en histoire littéraire de passer de l’ironie au mythe, mais aussi sur l’ascendant de Tolkien sur la fiction fantaisiste de Frye. Dans les chapitres suivants, Denham explore la préférence de Frye pour le romantique et sa critique du réalisme, qui trouvent écho chez Oscar Wilde, de même que leur conviction, partagée, de l’importance de l’art, et de la critique comme étant aussi créative que la littérature. L’admiration de Frye pour le concept d’interpénétration présenté dans le Science in the Modern World de Whitehead est devenue un élément clé des réflexions de Frye sur la portée de la littérature et de la religion. Denham explore aussi le lien entre Frye et Martin Buber, dont la méditation I and Thou l’a beaucoup inspiré, et celui entre Frye et R.S. Crane, qui parle beaucoup d’Aristote dans son ouvrage The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry. Le chapitre 9 explore la relation entre Frye et son tuteur d’Oxford, Edmund Blunden, alors que le dernier chapitre porte sur Frye et M.H. Abrams, et notamment sur le projet critique de Frye compris à la lumière du cadre sur la théorie critique développé par Abrams dans The Mirror and the Lamp. Ce livre est publié en anglais.
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.
In the third published volume of Canadian literary critic Frye's (1912-91) 77 holograph notebooks, the material is mostly from the 1970s, when he was writing the first of his books on the Bible, The Great Code. However, it begins with Notebook Three from the late 1940s in which he writes primarily on religious themes. It concludes with Notebook 23 from the middle 1980s, written between his first and second book on the Bible; and one from the 1960s devoted largely to his reading of Dante's Purgatorio and the first ten cantos of the Paradiso. Altogether the volume contains 11 notebooks, three sets of typed notes, and a transcription of 24 lectures on The Mythological Framework of Western Culture in 1981-82. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).
A collection of quotations from Canada’s greatest literary theorist. "There is no Canadian writer of whom we can say ... that their readers can grow up inside their work without ever being aware of a circumference." Northrop Frye came to that conclusion after a detailed study of the imaginative achievements of Canada’s writers from the earliest period to 1965, when that sentence from his study first appeared in print. Over the decades since then, the statement has come to be regarded as a benchmark of individual and national literary achievement. The Northrop Frye Quote Book is a specialized dictionary of quotations on all subjects that is based on the thoughts and writings of one person. It is the handiwork of a single contributor, albeit the cogitations of a remarkable one. It is also evidence that there is a Canadian writer of whom it may be said that we can grow up inside his work "without ever being aware of a circumference." John Robert Colombo has written, translated, edited, or compiled over two hundred books, including seven dictionaries of quotations. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto and a Fellow of the Frye Centre at Victoria University. Jean O’Grady, a graduate of the University of Toronto, served as the associate editor of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. She is also the author of the biography of Margaret Addison, the first dean of women at Victoria College.
