Frye Studies – serie

Following Northrop Frye's death in 1991, a large archive of his correspondence, unpublished criticism, and notebooks was deposited with the Victoria University Library at the University of Toronto. This collection of essays, written by a distinguished group of Frye experts, begins the process of reassessing Frye's thought and writings in light of the extraordinary material contained in this archive.The eight essays included here illuminate in new and significant ways both Frye's critical theories and their philosophical underpinnings. They show that Frye's was a many-sided and yet strikingly consistent process of meditation that was not fully reflected in his published works, for all their adventurous scope and brilliance. This impressive collection highlights the continuing relevance of Frye's ideas and gives a broader sense of his writing and his achievement.

Following Northrop Frye's death in 1991, a large archive of his correspondence, unpublished criticism, and notebooks was deposited with the Victoria University Library at the University of Toronto. This collection of essays, written by a distinguished group of Frye experts, begins the process of reassessing Frye's thought and writings in light of the extraordinary material contained in this archive.The eight essays included here illuminate in new and significant ways both Frye's critical theories and their philosophical underpinnings. They show that Frye's was a many-sided and yet strikingly consistent process of meditation that was not fully reflected in his published works, for all their adventurous scope and brilliance. This impressive collection highlights the continuing relevance of Frye's ideas and gives a broader sense of his writing and his achievement.

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 Biblical and Classical Myths recreates the thought behind that course, with Frye's lectures - unpublished until very recently - supplemented by Macpherson's popular 1962 textbook on classical mythology, Four Ages: The Classical Myths.Frye's lectures on the Bible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.

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.

In his long and eminent scholarly career, Northrop Frye engaged with subjects ranging from classics to twentieth-century writings. Northrop Frye's Canadian Literary Criticism examines the impact of Frye's criticism on Canadian literary scholarship as well as the response of Frye's peers to his articulation of a 'Canadian' criticism.Frye's belief that Canadian writing should be studied within the context of Canadian life rather than evaluated autonomously, in relation to the world's literature, was controversial. While there were those who favoured Frye's position and extended its use for wider theoretical applications, those who criticized Frye's stance felt that Canadian authors should not be exempt from universally sanctioned critical standards. Branko Gorjup and an esteemed group of contributors skilfully capture the tension that arose from this binary critical problematic and document the various attempts at resolving or transcending it, encouraging a remapped understanding of Frye and locating his place in Canadian criticism from a contemporary perspective.

In Body of Vision, Michael Sinding connects Northrop Frye’s groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of the human imagination with cognitive poetics – the cutting-edge school of literary criticism that applies the principles of cognitive science to the interpretation of literary texts and contexts. Sinding undertakes this task through analyses of the interplay of metaphoric and narrative schemas in several forms of cultural mythology.Sinding identifies the profound connections between cognitive views of language, literature, and culture and Frye’s views by exploring three related aspects of Frye’s work – meaning and thought, culture and society, and literary history. He investigates these connections through detailed studies of major cultural texts including Dante’s Divine Comedy, Hobbes’ Leviathan, Rousseau’s Social Contract, and Milton’s "Lycidas." By linking Frye’s classic studies to exciting recent approaches in the humanities and the cognitive revolution of the past few decades, Body of Vision casts Frye’s achievements in a fascinating new light.

Northrop Frye and American Fiction challenges recent interpretations of American fiction as a secular pursuit that long ago abandoned religious faith and the idea of transcendent experiences. Inspired by recent philosophical thinking on post-secularism and by Northrop Frye’s theorizing on the connections between the Bible and the development of Western literature, Claude Le Fustec presents insightful readings of the presence of transcendence and biblical imagination in canonical novels by American writers ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Toni Morrison.Examining these novels through the lens of Frye’s ambitious account of literature’s transcendent, or kerygmatic power, Le Fustec argues that American fiction has always contained the seeds of a rejection of radical skepticism and a return to spiritual experience. Beyond an insightful analysis of Frye’s ideas, Northrop Frye and American Fiction is powerful testimony of their continued interpretive potential.