This collection of essays begins the process of reassessing Frye's thought and writings in light of extraordinary, unpublished material contained in archives at the Victoria University Library, University of Toronto.
Frye and the Word draws together leading scholars in the fields of literary studies and hermeneutics, religious studies, and philosophy to construe and debate the late thought and writings of Northrop Frye in their spiritual dimension.
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.
“Diane Dubois takes a contextual approach to Northrop Frye’s work and claims that it is best assessed in relation to his biographical circumstances. In context and in specific details, Dubois’ book seeks to illuminate Frye’s œuvre as a personal, lifelong project. This volume successfully situates Frye’s work within the social, political, religious and philosophical conditions of the time and place of conception and writing. Dubois ranges from Frye’s critical utopia and views on criticism and education through the university, church and William Blake to politics and the Canadian and academic milieu. This book, which is particularly good at tracing Frye’s academic influences and his roots in Methodism and Canada, will have a strong appeal to an international audience of general readers, students, teachers and specialists. Frye is a key figure in the cultural and literary theory of the twentieth century, and Dubois’ accomplished discussion helps us to see his work anew.” – Jonathan Hart, author of Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination (1994), Interpreting Cultures (2006), Empires and Colonies (2008) and Literature, Theory, History (2011)
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.
Nella Cotrupi's Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process sheds a new conceptual light on Frye, successfully bringing him back into the central ring of contemporary critical thought. Challenging the often dismissive view of Frye's work as closed and outdated, Dr. Cotrupi explores the implications of his proposition that the history of criticism may be seen as having two main approaches — literature as "product" and literature as "process." In focusing on Frye's exploration of the process tradition Cotrupi sheds light on the agenda that Frye established for himself, when he noted at the end of Anatomy of Criticism that the reconciliatory task of criticism was to "reforge the broken link between creation and knowledge, art and science, myth and concept." Dr. Cotrupi recontextualizes Frye's thought and shows us how Frye continues to be, not only relevant, but central to a number of the key concerns in the contemporary critical scene. Re-examining Frye's place in the history of critical thought, Dr. Cotrupi builds upon Frye's original vision of the "process" tradition and suggests further directions this exploration may take. Among the current areas of critical engagement which Cotrupi examines are relativism, possible world theory, and postmodernism — making this work of interest not only to Frye scholars, but also to those interested in the debates currently rocking the world of criticism, literature and culture.
Eminent Frye scholar Robert D. Denham explores the connection between Frye and writers who influenced his thinking but about whom he never wrote anything extensive: Aristotle, Longinus, Joachim of Floris, Giordano Bruno, Henry Reynolds, Robert Burton, Kierkegaard, Lewis Carroll, Stéphane Mallarmé, Colin Still, Paul Tillich, and Frances A. Yates.
"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.
For Frye, the history of ideas is characterized by sets of opposing views which result in repeated cyclical movements in that history. In this study, Brian Russell Graham argues that Frye's own thinking transcends the ordinary history of ideas and offers what might be thought of as a dialectical and `suprahistorical' alternative. As Graham points out, much of Frye's thought is focused on secular concerns, and, within that context, his dialectical and `suprahistorical' thinking is `post-partisan,' a feature which also signifies and explains Frye's appeal. Graham contends it is the thinking of William Blake, specifically his conceptions of innocence and experience, which provides the inspiration for Frye's dialectical thinking. Graham systematically addresses the main areas of Frye's work: Blake's poetry, secular literature, education and work, politics, and Scripture. In following each of these themes, The Necessary Unity of Opposites expertly clarifies Frye's dialectical thinking, while drawing attention to its structural connection to Blake, Frye's great preceptor.