Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Renaissance Literature


Book Description

Michael Dolzani divides these notes into three categories: those on Spenser and the epic tradition; those on Shakespearean drama and, more widely, the dramatic tradition from Old Comedy to the masque; and those on lyric poetry and non-fiction prose.




Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Renaissance Literature


Book Description

Although Northrop Frye's first book, Fearful Symmetry (1947), elevated the reputation of William Blake from the status of a minor eccentric to that of a major Romantic poet, Frye in fact saw Blake as a poet (and, consequently, himself as a critic) not of the Romantic period, but of the Renaissance. As such, Frye's meditations on the Renaissance are particularly valuable. This volume collects six of Frye's notebooks and five sets of his typed notes on subjects related to Renaissance literature. Michael Dolzani divides these notes into three categories: those on Spenser and the epic tradition; those on Shakespearean drama and, more widely, the dramatic tradition from Old Comedy to the masque; and those on lyric poetry and non-fiction prose. The organization of this volume reflects 'a comprehensive study of Renaissance Symbolism' in three volumes, which Frye proposed to the Guggenheim Foundation in 1949. Frye received a Guggenheim fellowship, but never wrote the book; nevertheless, his application, part of which is also included here, is an important document. The Guggenheim application not only reveals the outlines of Frye's thinking about literature, it also uncovers his plans for his future creative life during the crucial period between his completion of Fearful Symmetry and his absorption in the writing of Anatomy of Criticism. In addition to providing insight into Frye's thinking process, the material collected into this key volume in the Collected Works is of particular importance because much of it has no direct counterpart in any of Frye's other published works.




Northrop Frye's Notebooks for Anatomy of Critcism


Book Description

Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957) is widely regarded as a masterpiece of literary theory. The product of years of reading and reflection, the book's 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 century's 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 Frye's 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 Frye's working process and a renewed appreciation for his magisterial accomplishment.




The Educated Imagination


Book Description

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.




Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Romance


Book Description

Romance was a theme that ran through much of Northrop Frye's corpus, and his notebooks and typed notes on the subject are plentiful. This unpublished material, written between 1944 and 1989, traces a remarkable re-evaluation in his thinking over the course of time. As a young scholar, Frye insisted that romance was an expression of cultural decadence; however, in his later years, he thought of it as "the structural core of all fiction." The unpublished material Michael Dolzani has gathered for Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Romance shows how the pattern and conventions of romance inform the writing of history, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and theology. While Frye is best known for his writing on myth and biblical scholarship, he himself eventually conceived of romance as the true and equal contrary to myth and scripture, a "secular scripture" whose message is de te fabula, "this story is about you." Given the current popular revival of romance in fiction and film, the appearance of Frye's unpublished work on romance is of profound importance.




The Reception of Northrop Frye


Book Description

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.




Northrop Frye and Others


Book Description

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.




A Northrop Frye Chrestomathy


Book Description

This chrestomathy is a selection of passages from the previously unpublished writings of Northrop Frye, much of it coming from his notebooks and diaries, which are now a part of his Collected Works (1996–2012). The passages, arranged alphabetically, form a discontinuous series of reflections on diverse topics that are worthy of extracting from their original source. The passages gathered here are aphoristic, insightful, clever, startling, amusing, contrarian, curious, powerful, salty, irreverent, unguarded, or otherwise noteworthy in the way they reveal Frye’s fertile mind at work. Frye is Canada’s greatest literary critic, and a good argument can be made that he is the greatest critical presence internationally of the last century. This book showcases the seeds of the ideas he often developed in his books and essays. The passages range widely across Frye’s sixty-year writing career, extending from the early 1930s until just before his death in 1991.




The Northrop Frye Quote Book


Book Description

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.




Educating the Imagination


Book Description

Northrop Frye's long career made him Canada's most creative public intellectual. A century after his birth, his many books demonstrate a powerful vision of the resources of the human imagination. Frye's critical theory sought the continuities linking human creation in all spheres of life, trusting in the idea of a single human community sharing myths, stories, and images that express shared visions and desires. The essays in Educating the Imagination illustrate the extraordinary range of Frye's ideas. Robert Bringhurst examines how Frye mapped the mind, Ian Balfour considers what "belief" meant for Frye, and Gordon Teskey re-examines two of the critic's great subjects - Blake and Milton. Michael Dolzani and Thomas Willard discuss Frye's symbolism, and Robert Tally looks at his utopianism. A strong thread running through all the essays is Frye's interest in the Romantic era, as Mark Ittenson shows. Three essays pair Frye with other titans of the time: Fredric Jameson, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. Troni Y. Grande examines a gender issue in Frye's theory of tragedy, and J. Edward Chamberlin concludes by relating Frye's writings to songs, ceremonies of belief, and the common ground that they represent across cultures. Engaging with significant matters of contemporary concern, Educating the Imagination provides a renewed understanding of Northrop Frye and the fertility of his ideas about the imagination and society. Contributors include Ian Balfour (York), Robert Bringhurst, Adam Carter (Lethbridge), J. Edward Chamberlin (Toronto), Alexander Dick (British Columbia), Michael Dolzani (Baldwin Wallace), Troni Y. Grande (Regina), Mark Ittensohn (Zurich), Garry Sherbert (Regina), Robert T. Tally, Jr., (Texas State), Gordon Teskey (Harvard), and Thomas Willard (Arizona).