Northrop Frye

Northrop Frye
Author: Robert D. Denham
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2004
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780813922997

The result is a pivotal work, redefining our understanding of one of the most important humanists of the twentieth century.

Northrop Frye

Northrop Frye
Author: David Rampton
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2010-10-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0776618733

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 They refute postmodernist arguments that Frye's literary criticism is obsolete and propose his wide-ranging and non-linear ways of thinking as a model for twenty-first century readers searching for innovative ways of understanding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.

Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics

Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics
Author: William Calin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2007-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics revisits the work and place of eight scholars roughly contemporary with Anglo-American New Criticism: Leo Spitzer, Ernst Robert Curtius, Erich Auerbach, Albert Béguin, Jean Rousset, C.S. Lewis, F.O. Matthiessen, and Northrop Frye. William Calin first considers the achievements of each critic, examining his methodology and basic presuppositions as well as the critiques marshalled against him. Calin explores their relation to history, to canon-formation, and to our current theoretical debates. He then goes on to show how all eight form a current in the history of criticism related to both humanism and modernism. Underscoring the international, cosmopolitian aspects of literary scholarship in the twentieth century, The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics brings together humanist critical traditions from Europe, the United Kingdom, and North America and reveals the surprising extent to which, in various languages and academic systems, critics were posing similar questions and offering a gamut of similar responses.

Northrop Frye and the Phenomenology of Myth

Northrop Frye and the Phenomenology of Myth
Author: Glen Robert Gill
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2006-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 144265838X

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.

Interviews With Northrop Frye

Interviews With Northrop Frye
Author: Jean O'Grady
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 1421
Release: 2008-04-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442692286

It is often forgotten that Northrop Frye, a scholar known chiefly for his books and articles, was also a gifted speaker who was never reluctant to be interviewed. This collection of 111 interviews and discussions with the critic assembles all of those published or broadcast on radio or television. Also included among the interviews are a number of conversations not generally known, many of them transcribed from tapes gathered from personal collections. Interviews with Northrop Frye aims to provide another view of the famous literary critic, one that supplements that which is often obtained from reading his printed works. Ranging from the earliest interviews in 1948 to discussions that took place mere months before his death in 1991, this volume is a complete portrait of Frye the conversationalist, demonstrating that he was capable of expressing his thought just as lucidly in person as he could on paper. Among the topics included are Frye’s views on teaching, writing, and Canadian literature, his opinions on the state of criticism, and a fascinating exchange concerning contemporary religion. For anyone interested in the life and career of Northrop Frye, these interviews are an ideal way to gain greater insight into the man and his work.

Anatomy of Criticism

Anatomy of Criticism
Author: Northrop Frye
Publisher:
Total Pages: 536
Release: 2006
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

This volume, the twenty-second in the acclaimed Collected Works of Northrop Frye series, presents Frye's most influential work, Anatomy of Criticism (1957). In four stylish and sweeping essays, Frye attempts to formulate an overall view of the scope, principles, and techniques of literary criticism and the conventions of literature - its modes, symbols, archetypes, and genres. He makes the case for criticism as a legitimate and structured science, a science that he would go on to wield with great influence over the course of his distinguished career. Robert D. Denham's introduction to this edition examines the book's genesis, its initial reception, and its relation to Frye's other works, particularly Fearful Symmetry (Volume 14 in the series). He highlights the diagrammatic way of thinking that characterizes Frye's brand of structuralism and explores the meaning of the word 'anatomy.' Denham also provides context for the work, considering the critical tradition out of which it emerged, as well as how it relates to some of the movements that appeared after the waning of structuralism. A key volume in the Collected Works series, this annotated and expertly introduced edition of Anatomy of Criticism will be sure to satisfy Frye's many admirers.

Words With Power

Words With Power
Author: Northrop Frye
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 693
Release: 2008-08-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442691751

Words with Power is the crowning achievement of the latter half of Northrop Frye's career. Portions of the work can be found in Frye's notebooks as far back as the mid-1960s when he had just finished Anatomy of Criticism, and he completed the book shortly before his death in 1991. Beyond summing up his ideas about the relation of the Bible to Western culture, Words with Power boldly confronts a host of questions ranging from the relationship between literature and ideology to the real meaning of words like 'spirit' and 'faith.' The first half of the 'double mirror' structure looks at the language in which the Bible is written, arguing that it is identical to that of myth and metaphor. Frye suggests, therefore, that given this characteristic, the Bible should be read imaginatively rather than historically or doctrinally. However, he is also careful to point out the ways in which the Bible is more than a conventional work of fiction. The second half is an astonishing tour de force in which Frye demonstrates how both the Bible and literature revolve around four primary concerns of human life. This edition goes beyond the original in its documentation of Frye's dazzlingly encyclopedic range of reference. Profound and searching, Words with Power is perhaps the most daring book of Frye's career and one of the most exciting.

The Northrop Frye Quote Book

The Northrop Frye Quote Book
Author: Northrop Frye
Publisher: Dundurn
Total Pages: 886
Release: 2014-02-24
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 1459719484

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.