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In the 1970s and 80s, Northrop Frye and Jay Macpherson co-taught a very influential course at the University of Toronto's Victoria College on the history of Western mythology ? Frye focusing on the biblical myths; Macpherson on the classical. Biblical and Classical Myths recreates the thought behind that course, with Frye's lectures ? unpublished until very recently ? supplemented by Macpherson's popular 1962 textbook on classical mythology, Four Ages: The Classical Myths.

Frye's lectures on the Bible make up the first half of the book. He expounds on an array of topics, including translations of the bible, sexual imagery, pastoral and agricultural imagery, and law and revolution in the bible. Four Ages makes up the second half. Macpherson narrates the major classical myths from stories of creation to the myths' survival in later European traditions.

By complementing the biblical tradition with the classical, this volume imparts a comprehensive understanding of western mythology. With a preface by Alvin Lee, general editor of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye, Biblical and Classical Myths is an essential volume and represents a unique achievement in scholarship.

Customer Reviews (2)

A must have for any graduate student...
If you're like me and greek mythology went in one ear and out the other in undergrad, then this book will help you shore up and regain what you've lost in the past.This is an excellent volume for any serious student of either Greek or Biblical mythology.I've only just started reading it, but it's very accessible.

Scintillating yet accessible explanations of Western culture: the best rebuttal to populist-style religion
The first half of this book is a series of lectures by Northrop Frye (1912-1991) called "Symbolism in the Bible". The second half is an uncommented collection of well-known classical myths introduced by the co-author, J. MacPherson. Although the second half is worth reading, the main attraction by far is the lectures by Frye, on which this review focuses.

This book is worth reading for theists and atheists who want to understand Western culture. One reason to read it is to understand references, allusions, and the biblical basis for all Western literature (Frye focuses on Milton, Blake and Shakespeare) as well as for modern life and figures of speech. Another reason is to understand the Bible at the mythological level it was intended, for "every syllable of the Gospels is written in myth." Another is to understand the attitude and real messages of the authors of the Bible - not what one might think. Even some one-liners make the book worthwhile, such as the idea that "almost all of Kafka's writings form an extended commentary on the Book of Job." One envies those who were lucky enough to attend a Frye lecture, but it is probably all for the better to be able to read and reread his thoughts in text. Although sparkling with wit and erudition, Frye's lectures are accessible and offer a good introduction to his much more concisely written classic, "The Great Code".

Comments on the Bible's authors and motives: "...no serious religion ever tries to answer anybody's question, because in any serious or existential matter the progress in understanding is a progress through a sequence of formulating better questions." The New Testament authors avoided historical details because they distract from the message of the presence of God. Frye points out that according to [Judeo-Christian-Islamic] tradition, the authors of sacred text were like "holy tape-recorders ... working in a trance", whereas Frye (and probably all honest scholars) see the biblical authors as "agile and alert" minds proclaiming God. That is, at a minimum, the authors had a rather free hand in writing what they did.

One central idea is that the New Testament authors were less concerned about historical accuracy and more concerned about claiming fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy. Subtle echoes are to be found everywhere, such as the basket of the baby Moses and the manger of the baby Jesus. Adam and Eve sin by learning to distinguish good and evil, which is the basis of the Pharisees' legalism - the sin against which Jesus rails in the New Testament. Sceptics can rightly say that the whole thing may have been made up and none of it was real, but again, the authors were not concerned about historical reality, they just want to proclaim God. More important than historical accuracy, as Frye concludes his book, is the message of love that is transmitted to the reader's heart.

Frye taught that heaven is the world as it appears to the awakened imagination. Here Frye emphasises that the Bible's conception of time and space is not literal (Newtonian) and is no basis for the sadistic tradition of threatening eternal hell. "In Jesus' teaching [about heaven and hell], the fundamental reality of things was a division into his spiritual kingdom of heaven and the world of unending torment that man keeps constructing for himself."

One unfortunate remark by Frye flaws the book. He ridicules the Big Bang Theory, stating that scientists devised it in order to have their own creation myth "which says that the world [sic] exploded, oh, say fifteen billion years ago or thereabouts, and has been scattering in all directions ever since." Whether or not this was meant in jest, it shows an ignorant snobbery from an otherwise great mind writing an otherwise great book.

Frye repeatedly explained in his writings that his motivation was to give 20th century students - having little or no familiarity with the Bible compared to earlier ages - a "cultural memory" from which to understand English literature. The 21st century reader also wonders about the threat of those who only understand their sacred books at a literal level and are neither interested in culture nor literature.

Other must-read books from the same author are "The Great Code" and "The Educated Imagination". For a more detailed view of the history and context of the books of the Bible, "Asimov's Guide to the Bible" is excellent. For detailed analysis of the authorship of the Pentateuch, R. Friedman's "Who Wrote the Bible?" is recommended.
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In the early 1960s, Northrop Frye began keeping notebooks with the aim of creating a critical epic that he referred to as the 'Third Book', a project intended as his third major work following Fearful Symmetry and Anatomy of Criticism.As described by Michael Dolzani, Frye's ambition for the 'Third Book' was for it to become no less than a "symbolic guide to the entire universe".The work he envisioned contemplated the ways in which myth and metaphor are the keys to all verbal structures: how they reach beyond the hypothetical realm of literature to inform, organize, and control historical, conceptual, political, and perhaps scientific thought.

Although ultimately abandoned, the 'Third Book' remains both an essential component of the larger Collected Works of Northrop Frye and an intriguing text in its own right.Michael Dolzani provides an eloquent introduction that adds an essential unifying frame to the fragmented and complex critical musings which comprise this enormous volume of work.Further, he has incorporated much useful background material and cross-referencing, enhancing the value of this volume as an indispensable research tool.

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Northrop Frye once wrote in one of his notebooks: I’ve always wanted to write "my own" book of pensées, not like Pascal’s but more like Anatole France’s Jardin d’Epicure or (I’ve just discovered) Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave.… The disadvantage of this project is that it can’t be planned. Elsewhere in these pages he has more thoughts along these lines: It would be wonderful to write a whole book in the discontinuous aphoristic form in which things actually come to me.…Fulfilling Frye’s own idea, editor Robert D. Denham has made apt selections from the notebooks and diaries of this revered critic. Frye’s wit and brilliance are revealed in notes on literary matters, musings on religious ideas, and aphoristic speculations on a broad range of topics. Passages that are personal and autobiographical, such as the moving entries on the death of his wife Helen, provide a special human dimension. The notes, written over the course of fifty years, are cranky, idiosyncratic, irreverent, and cerebral, yet often down-to-earth. The Frye of the formal essays unbuttons his suit jacket and reveals his vulnerable self, all the while making insightful and sometimes acerbic comments on a wide range of subjects, illuminating his own character and thought in ways that reveal a diVerent man and writer than most have previously envisioned. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Gives you an intimate picture
This would be difficult for anyone who hasn't read several of his books and much of Blake.Many of the entries are cryptic and no indication of dates is given for the notebook entries.It may have been impossible for the editor to provide even rough dates but without them, the entries lose context.Nevertheless, reading this makes you feel privy to things that even Frye's friends would not have known.You could spend many pleasant years pondering some of his remarks or tracking down allusions and references.

Great piece of serendipity
That's right.Just open a page and start reading, and chances are, like in a dream, something will strike you with mysterious force and with application to the day's situation.Or it does that for me.
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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.

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The late Northrop Frye is Canada's best-known literary and cultural critic, and one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century. During his lifetime, Frye developed a profoundly religious epistemology that informed and infused much of what he wrote. In bringing together his writings on the Bible and religion, this volume offers many keys to the dynamic essence of Frye's thought.

Well-organized, insightfully introduced, and carefully edited, this scholarly, annotated edition covers nearly the full range of Frye's intensive intellectual work on religion. (The Great Code and Words with Power will be published in separate volumes of the collected edition.) The writings presented here span a period of fifty-seven years and range from prayers to convocation addresses. Although remarkably diverse in form and content, they reveal the splendid coherence of Frye's vision.

This is a quintessential volume in the Collected Works, indispensable to all who have been inspired by Frye's work. In it we find the brilliant and often unorthodox record of a great mind imaginatively open to the transforming power of the Bible, and open also to what William Blake called "the human form divine." ... Read more

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'Frye was a person of uncommon gifts, and very little that came from his pen is without interest.' So writes Robert Denham in his introduction to this unique collection of twenty-two papers written by Northrop Frye during his student years. Made public only after Frye's death in 1991, all but one of the essays are published here for the first time.

The majority of these papers were written for courses at Emmanuel College, the theology school of Victoria College at the University of Toronto. Essays such as 'The Concept of Sacrifice,' 'The Fertility Cults,' and 'The Jewish Background of the New Testament' reveal the links between Frye's early research in theology and the form and content of his later criticism. It is clear that even as a theology student Frye's first impulse was always that of the cultural critic. The papers on Calvin, Eliot, Chaucer, Wyndham Lewis, and on the forms of prose fiction show Frye as precociously witty, rigorous, and incisive - a gifted writer who clearly found his voice before his last undergraduate year.

David Lodge wrote in the New Statesman: 'There are not many critics whose twenty-year-old book reviews one can read with pleasure and instruction, but Frye is an exception to most rules.' Northrop Frye's student essays provide pleasure and instruction through their comments on the Augustinian view of history, on beauty, truth, and goodness, on literary symbolism and tradition. ... Read more

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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 Frye's 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. ... Read more

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Eradicating once and for all the unfounded notion that Frye was not a political writer, this eleventh volume in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye gathers together all of Northrop Frye's writings on politics, culture, the arts, history, literature, mass media, and music.

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An indispensable introduction to one of the great critics of the twentieth century, whose work on ideology, aesthetics and social criticism has ensured his place at the centre of cultural studies and contemporary theoretical debates. ... Read more

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In Northrop Frye and the Phenomenology of Myth, Glen Robert Gill compares Frye's theories about myth to those of three other major twentieth-century mythologists: C.G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Mircea Eliade. Gill explores the theories of these respective thinkers as they relate to Frye's discussions of the phenomenological nature of myth, as well as its religious, literary, and psychological significance.

Gill substantiates Frye's work as both more radical and more tenable than that of his three contemporaries. Eliade's writings are shown to have a metaphysical basis that abrogates an understanding of myth as truly phenomenological, while Jung's theory of the collective unconscious emerges as similarly problematic. Likewise, Gill argues, Campbell's work, while incorporating some phenomenological progressions, settles on a questionable metaphysical foundation. Gill shows how, in contrast to these other mythologists, Frye's theory of myth - first articulated in Fearful Symmetry (1947) and culminating in Words with Power (1990) - is genuinely phenomenological.

With excursions into fields such as literary theory, depth psychology, theology, and anthropology, Northrop Frye and the Phenomenology of Myth is essential to the understanding of Frye's important mythological work.

Customer Reviews (1)

Unique Look at 20th Century Mythography
I've only skimmed the book and read it in sections, but I like what I see so far.I give it 5 stars mainly because I've never come across a comparable book.

I don't know Frye's work, but I've known of him for a long time.Besides mythology in general, I've had an interest in the Bible for many years and I was vague familiar with his influence.My most favorite theorist on mythology is Jung (partly because he was influenced by Gnostic Christianity), Campbell also interests me greatly, but Eliade I'm only slightly more familiar with than Frye.As this book covers all 4, I thought it would be a great way of getting my bearings in this vast field of study.

My only criticism is that the book is too slim for covering so much territory.I was reading the chapter on Jung, and I didn't get the sense that the author was giving Jung full justice.However, I'm willing to be forgiving on this issue because this book is primarily about Frye and not Jung.I wouldn't mind some day reading an even more in-depth work that focused just on Jung and Frye.I think these two scholars represent distinct ways of thinking about religion and mythology.

If nothing else, this book will be a good introduction to Frye's scholarship.I've been resistant to reading Frye because, compared to Jung, I get the sense that he is more of a respectable academic (i.e., abstract theorizing separated from subjective human experience).But maybe this book will help me to get past a mere theoretical view of Frye's mind (especially if I read it along with Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World Robert D. Denham). ... Read more

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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free.This is an OCR edition with typos.Excerpt from book:THE THIRD CENTURYWILL you see the infancy of this sublime and celestial greatness ? Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had from the womb, and that divine light wherewith I was born arc the best unto this day, wherein I can see the Universe. By the Gift of God they attended me into the world, and by His special favour I remember them till now. Verily they seem the greatest gifts His wisdom could bestow, for without them all other gifts had been dead and vain. They are unattainable by book, and therefore I will teach them by experience. Pray for them earnestly : for they will make you angelical, and wholly celestial. Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of. the world, than I when I was a child.All appeared new, and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful. I was a little stranger, , which at my entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys. My knowledge was Divine. I knew by intuition those things which since my Apostasy, I collected again by the highest reason. My very ignorance was advantageous. I seemed as one brought into the Estate of Innocence. All things were spotless and pure and glorious : yea, and infinitely mine, and joyful and precious. I knew not that there were any sins, or complaints or laws. I dreamed not of poverties, contentions or vices. All tears and quarrels were hidden from mine eyes. Everything was at rest, free and immortal. I knew nothing of sickness or death or rents or exaction, either for tribute or bread. In the absence of these I was entertained like an Angel with the works of God in their splendour and glory, I saw all in the peace of Eden ; Heaven and Earth did sing my Creator's praises, and could not make more melody to Adam, than to me. All Time was Ete... ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

This Review is For the Dobel Edition!
WARNING! Amazon sticks reviews for one edition of a book under other editions. Presenting a review of the Dobel edition paperback as a review ofthe butchered OCR paperback edition amounts to outright lying on the part of Amazon! The Dobel edition published by Cosimoclassics (with the picture of the statue of an angel on the front) is a good edition. The unedited OCR edition is not. Unfortunately, Amazon will not allow me to review both editions! Nor do they give the publisher of the books. Don't accept anything that you would not have bought if you had looked at it in a bookstore. If you get a poorer edition than you ordered, return it and demand a full refund for the cost of the book and shipping both ways!

The text itself is good beyond my ability to describe. Traherne is a poet (although his meditations here are written as prose), a deep thinker, and a devout Christian.

WARNING: The Dobel edition may also be availabe in an OCR! The buyer must beware these days when ording books from Amazon.

A further warning: Amazon pictures accompanying a review may not be of the edition reviewed! ... Read more

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Even the casual reader will notice a strong preoccupation with religion in the work of Northrop Frye. In his latest book, however, the esteemed Frye scholar Robert Denham shows that it played a far greater role than has been assumed-religion was in fact central to practically everything Frye wrote. Denham's focus shifts the emphasis from Anatomy of Criticism, Frye's most famous work, and places it on those works with which Frye began and ended his career-the early Fearful Symmetry and, fifty years later, his two studies of the Bible and The Double Vision. This reevaluation is based on a close examination of Frye's religiously charged language and aided by Denham's remarkable and unique access to Frye's notebooks. The notebooks' contents not only expand on ideas laid out in Frye's published works but also touch on subjects most readers would not associate with Frye, such as his wide reading in both Eastern religious texts and in esoteric traditions ranging from astrology to the Cabala.

Denham does not attempt to distill a theology from Frye's work; rather, he seeks to trace the movement of Frye's thought, demonstrating the imaginative use to which he put his wide-ranging reading. The result is a pivotal work, redefining our understanding of one of the most important humanists of the twentieth century. ... Read more

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Stories shape the world, imposing order on chaos, and the stories we tell declare: I exist. Neil Bissoondath presses these assertions about narrative further. Stories are also, he says, forms of confession. Each time we tell a story, we reveal a little about our experiences, dreams, fears, desires, and fantasies. Unlike governments, which try to control and simplify narrative, fiction writers use narrative expansively, for exploration and discovery. Questions are numerous; answers are rare. Fiction is confessional; born of the writer's own visions, terrors, and obsessions, it is unique in its ability to affirm human existence and confirm human complexity. The Age of Confession is the first Northrop Frye-Antonine Maillet Lecture, sponsored by the Université de Moncton. It was presented on April 29, 2006, in Moncton, New Brunswick, during the Northrop Frye International Literary Festival. ... Read more