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This volume, which collects Northrop Frye's writings on the theory of literary criticism from the middle period of his career, includes one of Frye's own favourites, The Critical Path (1971). A highly important marker of Frye's 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.

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Presented here is a selection from the professional and personal correspondence of Northrop Frye, one of the preeminent literary critics of the last century. With frank and accessible appraisals, the letters reveal Frye's attitudes toward scores of topics: the value of James Bond thrillers, the gap between faith and reason, surrealism, hippies, Milton's imagery, comparative literature, political hysteria in the U.S., the nature of the educated imagination, anarchism, the teaching of religion in the university, the Proteus myth, the distinction between subjects and themes, the connection between Nietzsche and Yeats, the difference between cliche and aphorism, the fussy rules of copy editors, and scores of other issues. ... Read more

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Drawn from previously unpublished essays, talks, reviews and papers, this volume of Northrop Frye's collected works spans some fifty years of his long writing career. The earliest item is a paper on The Canterbury Tales dating from Frye's student days at Oxford. The latest was written in 1989, on the occasion of his receiving his thirty-sixth honorary degree from the University of Bologna.

The center-piece of the collection is Frye's lengthy and ambitious essay, "Rencontre." Intended as an introduction to a never-published anthology of English literature, it is unique in Frye's oeuvre, being the only example of a sustained, continuous encounter with an entire literary tradition. "Rencontre" is a masterwork in its own right. Other important essays include: "Shakespeare and the Comedy of Humours," "The Literary Meaning of 'Archetype,'" and "Blake's Jerusalem."

Frye was a profound and original thinker whose stature has not yet been fully realized. The writings collected here not only exemplify his extraordinary mind and elegant prose style - they show a far-sightedness and range that has not been seen before. ... Read more

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In the fourth annual Antonine Maillet-Northrop Frye Lecture, Monique LaRue offers a rare glimpse of one writer's experience of "between time" -- how fiction writers spend their time between books. It is in this critical period that she works with, generates, abandons, and embraces ideas for new books. Literary creation is an act driven by inspiration, or, as LaRue explains it, by the moment of kairos, when the form of the work in progress reveals itself in an instant, intuitively. To get there, LaRue navigates social time in the immediacy of the present and in the distance of the past, both experienced and chronicled. Both persepectives help her build towards a new nexus of creative output. Her account of finding where her voice will take her next is simultaneously intellectual and personal as she traces her debt to her experience as a mother, the oral tradition, her training as a philosopher, and her evolving feminism. ... Read more

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Nortrop Frye differed from other theorists of myth in tracing all of the major literary genres--romance, comedy, satire, not just tragedy--to myth and ritual. This volume is the most thorough presentation of his thinking on the subject. ... Read more

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In this volume drawn from papers given at an international symposium on Northrop Frye in Hoh-Hot, Inner Mongolia, editors Jean O'Grady and Wang Ning have created far more than a summary of the proceedings. NorthropFrye: Eastern and Western Perspectives presents 'a double mirror,' wherein 'the west and its critical theory are reflected in China, and China reflects back to the west the use it has made of it.'

The first section - 'Frye as Theorist' - offers insights into his theoretical approaches and the new context provided by cross-cultural questions. The second section applies his theory to Canadian literature and includes a memorable reading of Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye by James Steele. Finally, in 'Frye and China,' Chinese scholars study the reception of archetypal criticism in China, and - breaking new ground - apply his critical method to their own literature. This volume asks far-reaching questions about the universality of Frye's theory. It ends with a valuable bibliography of 35 recent Chinese works on Frye and archetypal theory.

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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.

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The religious context of Northrop Frye's criticism is virtually inexhaustible in its reach and implication. 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 volume provides the first full account and evaluation of the legacy of Frye's works on the Bible and literature, in relation to Frye's work as a whole and to current trends in literary criticism and religious studies.

Frye's trilogy, The Great Code, Words with Power, and The Double Vision, both showed him to be a radical Blakean visionary and carried him forward into an urgent engagement with the imaginative and spiritual dimension as expressed in language, myth and metaphor, tools of recognition, and revelation. Frye struggled to understand and articulate how the Bible enjoyed ? for reasons still to be fully appreciated in their literary context ? an apparently unequalled spiritual and cultural authority, and what this authority could tell us about our primary concerns as human beings and our still unrealized potential for fulfillment. This collection, then, is about Frye's own engagement with words and the Word, with secular and sacred scripture -- about a unifying principle that lies often unrecognized, if everywhere manifest, in the spiritual and imaginative dimensions of language.

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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. Cotrupiexplores the implications ofhis 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. ... Read more

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Northrop Frye, in his "Anatomy of Criticism", has identified four main myths: Comedy, Romance, Tragedy, and Irony/Satire. Frye believed that a critic could simply organize literature into these phases to show that literature formed "an ideal order." ... Read more

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Northrop Frye is conceivably Canada's most celebrated literary theorist, but his role in the country's cultural evolution has perhaps been overlooked by later Canadian scholars in favour of his better-known literary criticism.This collection brings together all of the writings of Northrop Frye, both published and heretofore unpublished, on the subject of Canadian literature and culture.From his early book reviews of the 1930s and 1940s through his explorations of the patterns of Canadian literature in the fifties, to his cultural commentaries of the sixties, seventies, and eighties (including all his essays from The Bush Garden and Divisions on a Ground), Northrop Frye on Canada is vivid testimony to his position as an astute critic of his country's literature and a vital participant in its cultural evolution.

All of Frye's writings on Canadian literature and culture - essays, articles, reviews, and speeches - are published in their entirety and are accompanied by a detailed introduction and contextual headnotes to each piece.Gathered from more than fifty years of Frye's career, the collection shows Frye as a careful and caring critic of Canada, and is demonstrative of his importance as the cultural commentator on Canada.

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This volume brings together 95 different pieces on education by Northrop Frye, dating from 1931 to 1989.It traces Frye's 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.Frye's 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 Frye's biography and the changes in university education over his lifetime; the other discussing them theoreticallyand 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 life's work, and no Frye scholar or enthusiast should be without them. ... Read more