Northrop Frye on Religion (Collected Works of Northrop Frye)
by Northrop Frye
from University of Toronto Press
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."
Northrop Frye's Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (Collected Works of Northrop Frye)
by Northrop Frye
from University of Toronto Press
Northrop Frye's expansive and influential lectures on the literary symbolism of the Bible given during 1981-2 are arguably among his best and most accessible works. This thirteenth volume in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye gathers together these lectures and Frye's notebooks on the Bible, Dante, and Eastern religion. The eleven holograph notebooks and the twenty-four lectures transcribed here present new insights into Frye's personality, methods, and thought, and complement the other published editions of Frye's notebooks in this series, The Late Notebooks (2000) and The 'Third Book' Notebooks (2002).
The notebook material comes mostly from the 1970s, when Frye was at work on the first of his books on the Bible, The Great Code, but also includes one notebook from the 1940s, another from the 1960s, devoted to Frye's reading of Dante's Purgatorio and the first ten cantos of the Paradiso, and another from the 1980s, when Frye was at work on his second book on the Bible, Words with Power. Fully annotated, this latest volume in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye will be an invaluable addition to any literary or religious scholar's library.
A Glorious and Terrible Life with You: Selected Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932-1939
from University of Toronto Press
Northrop Frye's status as one of the most influential critics and intellectuals of the twentieth century makes it difficult to gauge the personal qualities of the man behind the work. However, an intimate picture is revealed through the correspondence Frye exchanged with his first wife, Helen Kemp, and which he bequeathed to Victoria College at the time of his death. In A Glorious and Terrible Life with You, Margaret Burgess presents the essential narrative at the heart of the correspondence, focusing on the thoughts, feelings, and formative experiences of the two central protagonists as they chronicle both their own intertwined voyages of growth and discovery and the central events of their time.
Bringing to life their interactions with families and friends, their educational milieu, and the significant cultural and historical currents of the 1930s, these letters show both Frye and Kemp engaging with and contributing to the unique cultural climate of the period. Rich and compelling, they exemplify the wonderful eloquence and vitality of spirit that is evident throughout all of the correspondence. A Glorious and Terrible Life with You is a touching and highly revealing account of the relationship between two kindred spirits and remarkable minds.
Lavishly illustrated, this new edition includes family photographs and original graphics by both Helen Kemp and her father, S.H.F. Kemp, mostly dating from his own student days at the University of Toronto.
The 'Third Book' Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964-1972: The Critical Comedy (Collected Works of Northrop Frye)
by Northrop Frye
from University of Toronto Press
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.
The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932-1939 (Collected Works of Northrop Frye)
Robert D. Denham has collected in these volumes the 266 letters, cards, and telegrams that Helen Kemp and Northrop Frye wrote to each other during the six periods when they were apart, from the winter of 1931-32 until the summer of 1939. The letters form a compelling narrative of their early relationship. They tell of a romance in which two people fall in love, want to get married, and are confronted with obstacles blocking their path, including lack of money and the education they both need to advance their careers. But the story is much more than a romance.
The letters reveal Frye's early talent as a writer, illustrating that both the matter and the manner of his criticism had begun to take shape when he was only nineteen. Helen Kemp's expressiveness and intelligence come through clearly in her letters, which were only discovered in 1992. Kemp and Frye share their thoughts on literature, music, religion, politics, education, and a host of other topics. They discuss their alma mater, Victoria College; artists and musicians of Toronto; southwestern Saskatchewan, where Frye spent a summer as a pastor on a United Church circuit; Frye's hometown, Moncton, New Brunswick; and Kemp's neighbourhood on Fulton Avenue in Toronto. We travel with them around the world, from Ottawa to Rome. We see through their eyes the early years of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the struggles of the United Church of Canada, the activities of the Student Christian Movement, the appeal of Communism, the rise of fascism, and the beginnings of art education in the galleries of Canada.
Northrop Frye's Late Notebooks,1982-1990 (Collected Works of Northrop Frye)
by Northrop Frye
from University of Toronto Press
An inveterate notebook keeper, Northrop Frye continually jotted down his ideas and thoughts as he worked through the complex schemes of his criticism. Volumes 5 and 6 of the Collected Works are the notebooks that he kept while writing his two final books, "Words with Power" and "The Double Vision". They provide a record of what he was reading and thinking as he struggled with the implications of those projects. In a sense they are the workshops out of which the books were constructed.
While focusing on the works-in-progress, the 3684 entries presented here range over diverse territory, never failing to surprise, delight, and provoke. In these notebooks, for instance, we find comments triggered by a detective story Frye is reading, a lecture he has to prepare, a glance at the books on his shelves, a quotation he remembers, a letter received, or the memory of a trip. In many respects, the notebooks reveal a Frye who is quite different from the critic who made his reputation with "Fearful Symmetry" and "Anatomy of Criticism", displaying aspects of his personality and thought that are not apparent in his books and essays. The notebooks show us the unbuttoned Frye, a complex man capable of both spiritual transcendence and hard-headed pragmatism. Here, for instance, his criticism of Catholicism is far more acerbic than in anything he published. Likewise, his rejection of both Marxist and feminist ideology is far more pointed than elsewhere.
These two volumes include seven of Frye's handwritten notebooks and five collections of his typed notebooks - all previously unpublished. The material is the record of an extraordinary intellectual odyssey, an odyssey that is, at its base, deeply spiritual.
Northrop Frye Unbuttoned: Wit and Wisdom from the Notebooks and Diaries
by Robert D. Denham
from Gnomon Press
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.
Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (Collected Works of Northrop Frye)
by Northrop Frye
from University of Toronto Press
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.
Written between 1934 and 1986, these collected works illustrate the extent of Frye's engagement with the unfolding events of twentieth-century political life, from the Great Depression to the Reagan / Thatcher / Mulroney era. The centrepiece of the volume, Frye's learned and wide-ranging contribution to the Canadian confederation celebrations, The Modern Century (1967), is accompanied by pieces that reflect Frye's observations on such diverse political events as the Oxford 'King and Country' debate and the Vietnam war, revealing Frye the literary theorist as Frye the political entity.Jan Gorak's extensive introduction and annotations serve to historicize Frye and situate him and his work in the historical and critical context of twentieth-century Canada and North America. Frye's work is discussed in relation to that of T.S. Eliot, Edmund Wilson, Raymond Williams, Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, E.J. Pratt, A.J.M. Smith, F.A. Underhill, J.S. Woodsworth, George Grant, and especially Oswald Spengler. Erudite and enlightening, Frye's comments on politics are as relevant today as they were when he wrote them, and this volume will be a valuable reference for understanding the essential Frye.
Northrop Frye in Conversation (In Conversation series)
by David Cayley
from House Of Anansi
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