Northrop Frye

The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942-1955

With the publication of Fearful Symmetry in 1947, Northrop Frye gained wide renown as a literary theorist, a reputation that continued to build throughout his lifetime. This volume in the Collected Works provides a transcription of the seven books of diaries that Frye kept intermittently from 1942 until 1955. During the period of the final six diaries, 1949 - 1955, Frye was at work on Anatomy of Criticism, and he refers frequently to many of the essays written during this period that became a part of the book that brought him international acclaim. For Frye, diary-writing was a tool for recording .everything of importance. and this ruled out very little. His entries contain a large measure of self-analysis and self-revelation, and in this respect are confessional -- we see his sanguine humour, dark moods and claustrophobia, along with the more self-congratulatory aspects of his character. But the volume also serves as a chronicle. Peering over Fryes shoulder, we watch him teach his classes, plan his career, record his dreams, register his frank reactions to the hundreds of people who cross his path, eye attractive women, reflect on books, music and movies, ponder religious and political issues, consider his various physical and psychological ailments, practise the piano, visit bookstores, frequent Toronto restaurants, and record scores of additional activities, mundane and otherwise. The volume is fully annotated and contains a directory that identifies the more than 1200 people who make an appearance. Published here for the first time, these chronicles provide an unprecedented view of the life and times of this now-legendary scholar.

Northrop Frye's writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance

Introduction * The Argument of Comedy * Don Quixote * Comic Myth in Shakespeare * Characterization in Shakespearean Comedy * Molieres Tartuffe * Introduction to Shakespeares Tempest * The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene * Shakespeares Experimental Comedy * Toast to the Memory of Shakespeare * The Tragedies of Nature and Fortune * How True a Twain * Recognition in The Winters Tale * A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance * Shakespeare and the Modern World * Nature and Nothing * Fools of Time * General Editors Introduction to Shakespeare Series * Shakespeares The Tempest * Il Cortegiano * The Myth of Deliverance * Something Rich and Strange: Shakespeares Approach to Romance * The Stage is all the World * Northrop Frye on Shakespeare * Speech on Acceptance of the Governor Generals Award * Natural and Revealed Communities * Foreword to Unfolded Tales

Northrop Frye's notebooks for anatomy of criticism

Northrop Fryes Anatomy of Criticism (1957) is widely regarded as a masterpiece of literary theory. The product of years of reading and reflection, the books value extends far beyond its impact on criticism as a whole; ultimately, it must be viewed as a synoptic defense of liberal learning by one of the twentieth centurys most distinguished critics. In this, the twenty-third volume of the Collected Works, editor Robert D. Denham presents the notebooks to the Anatomy, blue-prints, as it were, for Fryes comprehensive account of literary conventions. Composed from the late 1940s to 1956, the notebooks document the struggle Frye underwent to provide a structure for his work. This involved incorporating previously published essays and developing new material that would maintain the continuity of his argument. This fully annotated volume contains seventeen holograph notebooks, each illuminating some aspect of the grand structure that eventually emerged. Altogether, the notebooks offer an intimate picture of Fryes working process and a renewed appreciation for his magisterial accomplishment.

Northrop Frye's Writings on Education

This volume brings together 95 different pieces on education by Northrop Frye, dating from 1931 to 1989. It traces Fryes thinking about education from his student days through the campus unrest of the 1960s and the more recent budgetary crises facing higher education in Canada. Fryes consistent affirmation that the goal of a liberal education is to make one maladjusted may give some hint as to the richness and variety of the writings collected here. Among the range of subjects that Frye addresses are teaching (from kindergarten to university), literary studies, the nature of the university, student radicalism, educational policy and procedure, and particular occasions in the life of Victoria University. The volume includes articles, speeches, reports, a short book, introductions, letters to the editor, and some obscure and newly discovered texts. As former students and colleagues of Frye, the editors have brought personal as well as scholarly knowledge to the volume. Each provides part of the introduction: the first placing the works in the context of Fryes biography and the changes in university education over his lifetime; the other discussing them theoretically and in relation to his ideas about literature and the imagination. Frye was influential not only as a theorist of education but as a teacher and administrator. His writings on education are a central part of his lifes work, and no Frye scholar or enthusiast should be without them.

The critical path and other writings on critical theory, 1963-1975

This volume, which collects Northrop Fryes writings on the theory of literary criticism from the middle period of his career, includes one of Fryes own favourites, The Critical Path (1971). A highly important marker of Fryes career, The Critical Path openly addresses topics that he had previously been reluctant to discuss as fully, including the importance of literature to society, the responsibilities of critics, and the deeper rationales for studying literature. Filled with insightful texts that indicate his transition from literary critic to a theorist of language, myth, and human culture, this edition helps to illuminate many of the ideas and arguments that would appear later in The Great Code and Words with Power. Accompanied by the rigorous scholarship for which the series is renowned, this is another valuable contribution to literary criticism and theory.

The Teacher's Source of Authority.

I want to consider the question of authority in education more particularly in connection with my own subject, the humanities. In the sciences, which deal primarily with mans relation to nature, the question of authority is more or less taken care of by such things as repeatable experiment and the possibility of prediction. If astronomers can predict an eclipse to within a second, the question of authority is inevitably bound up with their method, and there is no use arguing about the validity of observations that leads to such an impressive prediction. But the humanities belong to the world that man himself creates; consequently, some kind of fundamental questioning of postulates is built into the humanities from the beginning. Many of our ideas on education derive from Plato and the figure of Socrates, which is so important in Plato. What Plato writes is normally in a dialogue form that very frequently develops into what he calls the symposium, a group of people meeting together at a banquet and putting forward partial and individual views of a certain central theme (such as that of love in the dialogue called The Symposium), with the hope that this theme will manifest itself with all the vividness and impressiveness of a Platonic form or idea in the middle of society. In his last and most complicated work The Laws, Plato begins unexpectedly with the symposium that has a crucial importance in the actual regulating of society. He says that the symposium is an important element in education and is, to that extent, one of the ways of achieving the vision of authority that underlies The Laws. It seems extraordinary that the symposium should be used in this way in a work as serious and as comprehensive as The Laws, because elsewhere, Plato is quite clear about the limitations of the symposium in

Intoxicated with Words: The Colours of Rhetoric

Michael Dolzani’s essay in the present issue refers to what one finds here and there in Frye’s notebooks, ‘insightful assessments’ that come from ‘methodical close-quarters examinations’ of literary works that are ‘only glancingly mentioned in his published books.’ The same could be said of Frye’s treatment of literary history. Frye wrote a number of essays, many of them on individual writers and some on historical periods, that could well take their place as chapters in a literary history of English or American literature. But even though the first essay of Anatomy of Criticism contains his well-known theory of literary history, the actual writing of a continuous literary history was not something to which Frye devoted substantial attention. None of his books, except perhaps A Study of English Romanticism, is a literary history in any conventional sense. But writing such a history was a longstanding desire, going back to his university days in the 1930s, and the urge became formalized throughout his notebooks as one of the parts of what Frye called his

Creation and Recreation

Presents a series of lectures on the theological and sociological aspects of creation doctrine.

The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance

1. The Word and World of Man 2. The Context of Romance 3. Our Lady of Pain: Heroes and Heroines of Romance 4. The Bottomless Dream: Themes of Descent 5. Quis Hic Locus? Themes of Ascent 6. The Recovery of Myth Notes Index

A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance.

In A Natural Perspective, distinguished critic Northrop Frye maintains that Shakespeares comedy is widely misunderstood and underestimated, and that the four romances - Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winters Tale, and The Tempest - are the inevitable culmination of the poets career. Rather than comment only on individual plays, Frye treats the comedies as a group unified by recurrent structures, devices, and images: the storm at sea, the identical twins, the heroine disguised as a boy, the retreat into the forest, the heroine with a mysterious father.