"The present volume includes talks Frye gave that were tape-recorded but for which there is no extant manuscript, taped interviews and responses to questions not included in the volume of interviews of the Collected Works; a previously undiscovered notebook and portions of others, including an extensive series of notes on romance (93,000 words); a brief in opposition to the Macpherson Report on undergraduate education at the University of Toronto; an address about the contribution of Victoria College to Canadian culture; reviews that were until recently unknown to me and the other editors of the Collected Works; a reply to a questionnaire from the American Scholar, and an early essay on poetic diction."--Page xiii

This book, based on extensive archival and historical work, identifies and brings to light additional and littlerecognized intellectual influences on Frye, and analyzes how they informed his thought. These are variously major thinkers, sets of texts, and intellectual traditions: the Mahayana Sutras, Machiavelli, Rabelais, Boehme, Hegel, Coleridge, Carlyle, Mill, Jane Ellen Harrison and Elizabeth Fraser. In each chapter, dedicated to Frye’s connection to a specific influence, Denham describes how Frye became acquainted with each, and how he interpreted and adapted certain ideas from them to help work out his own conceptual systems. Denham offers insights on Frye’s relationship with his historical and intellectual contexts, provides valuable additional context for understanding the work of one of the 20th century’s leading scholars of literature and culture. Includes over 20 photos, tables and figures, as well as a chapter on Frye’s personal relationship with Elizabeth Fraser.

This chrestomathy is a selection of passages from the previously unpublished writings of Northrop Frye, much of it coming from his notebooks and diaries, which are now a part of his Collected Works (1996–2012). The passages, arranged alphabetically, form a discontinuous series of reflections on diverse topics that are worthy of extracting from their original source. The passages gathered here are aphoristic, insightful, clever, startling, amusing, contrarian, curious, powerful, salty, irreverent, unguarded, or otherwise noteworthy in the way they reveal Frye’s fertile mind at work. Frye is Canada’s greatest literary critic, and a good argument can be made that he is the greatest critical presence internationally of the last century. This book showcases the seeds of the ideas he often developed in his books and essays. The passages range widely across Frye’s sixty-year writing career, extending from the early 1930s until just before his death in 1991.

The Reception of Northrup Frye takes a thorough accounting of the presence of Frye in existing works and argues against Frye's diminishing status as an important critical voice.

"This volume brings together Northrop Frye's criticism on twentieth-century literature, a body of work produced over almost sixty years. Including Frye's incisive book on T.S. Eliot, as well as his discussions of writers such as James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and George Orwell, the volume also contains a recently discovered review of C.G. Jung's book on the synchronicity principle and a previously unpublished introduction to an anthology of twentieth-century literature. Frye's insightful commentaries demonstrate that he was as astute a critic of the literature of his own time as he was of the literature of earlier periods." "Glen Robert Gill's introduction delineates the development of Frye's criticism on twentieth-century literature, puts it in historical and cultural context, and relates it to his overarching theory of literature. This definitive volume in the Collected Works will be a welcome addition to the libraries of Frye specialists and of scholars and students of twentieth-century literature in general."--BOOK JACKET.

Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye are two of Canada’s central cultural figures, colleagues and rivals whose careers unfolded in curious harmony even as their intellectual engagement was antagonistic. Poet, novelist, essayist and philosopher B.W. Powe, who studied with both of these formidable and influential intellectuals, presents an exploration of their lives and work in Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye: Apocalypse and Alchemy. Powe considers the existence of a unique visionary tradition of Canadian humanism and argues that McLuhan and Frye represent fraught but complementary approaches to the study of literature and to the broader engagement with culture. Examining their eloquent but often acid responses to each other, Powe exposes the scholarly controversies and personal conflicts that erupted between them, and notably the great commonalities in their writing and biographies. Using interviews, letters, notebooks, and their published texts, Powe offers a new alchemy of their thought, in which he combines the philosophical hallmarks of McLuhan’s “The medium is the message” and Frye’s “the great code.”

The Oxford History of Poetry in English is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. The series both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the fourteen volumes. This volume explores the developing range of English verse in the century after the death of Chaucer in 1400, years that saw both change and consolidation in traditions of poetic writing in English in the regions of Britain. Chaucer himself was an important shaping presence in the poetry of this period, providing a stimulus to imitation and to creative expansion of the modes he had favoured. In addition to assessing his role, this volume considers a range of literary factors significant to the poetry of the century, including verse forms, literary language, translation, and the idea of the author. It also signals features of the century's history that were important for the production of English verse: responses to wars at home and abroad, dynastic uncertainty, and movements towards religious reform, as well as technological innovations such as the introduction of printing, which brought influential changes to the transmission and reception of verse writing. The volume is shaped to include chapters on the contexts and forms of poetry in English, on the important genres of verse produced in the period, on some of the fifteenth-century's major writers (Lydgate, Hoccleve, Dunbar, and Henryson), and a consideration of the influence of the verse of this century on what was to follow.