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.




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'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.




Northrop Frye's Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts


Book Description

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).




Northrop Frye


Book Description

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.




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.




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.




Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye


Book Description

Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye are two of Canada's central cultural figures, colleagues and rivals whose careers unfolded in curious harmony even as their intellectual engagement was antagonistic. Poet, novelist, essayist and philosopher B.W. Powe, who studied with both of these formidable and influential intellectuals, presents an exploration of their lives and work in Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye: Apocalypse and Alchemy. Powe considers the existence of a unique visionary tradition of Canadian humanism and argues that McLuhan and Frye represent fraught but complementary approaches to the study of literature and to the broader engagement with culture. Examining their eloquent but often acid responses to each other, Powe exposes the scholarly controversies and personal conflicts that erupted between them, and notably the great commonalities in their writing and biographies. Using interviews, letters, notebooks, and their published texts, Powe offers a new alchemy of their thought, in which he combines the philosophical hallmarks of McLuhan's “The medium is the message” and Frye's “the great code.”




Northrop Frye and Others


Book Description

This book, based on extensive archival and historical work, identifies and brings to light additional and littlerecognized intellectual influences on Frye, and analyzes how they informed his thought. These are variously major thinkers, sets of texts, and intellectual traditions: the Mahayana Sutras, Machiavelli, Rabelais, Boehme, Hegel, Coleridge, Carlyle, Mill, Jane Ellen Harrison and Elizabeth Fraser. In each chapter, dedicated to Frye’s connection to a specific influence, Denham describes how Frye became acquainted with each, and how he interpreted and adapted certain ideas from them to help work out his own conceptual systems. Denham offers insights on Frye’s relationship with his historical and intellectual contexts, provides valuable additional context for understanding the work of one of the 20th century’s leading scholars of literature and culture. Includes over 20 photos, tables and figures, as well as a chapter on Frye’s personal relationship with Elizabeth Fraser.




Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process


Book Description

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.