The widespread opinion is that Northrop Frye’s influence reached its zenith in the 1960s and 1970s, after which point he became obsolete, his work buried in obscurity. This almost universal opinion is summed up in Terry Eagleton’s 1983 rhetorical question, "Who now reads Frye?" In The Reception of Northrop Frye, Robert D. Denham catalogues what has been written about Frye – books, articles, translations, dissertations and theses, and reviews – in order to demonstrate that the attention Frye’s work has received from the beginning has progressed at a geomantic rate. Denham also explores what we can discover once we have a fairly complete record of Frye’s reception in front of us – such as Hayden White’s theory of emplotments applied to historical writing and Byron Almén’s theory of musical narrative. The sheer quantity of what has been written about Frye reveals that the only valid response to Eagleton’s rhetorical question is "a very large and growing number," the growth being not incremental but exponential.

This brilliant outline of Blake's thought and commentary on his poetry comes on the crest of the current interest in Blake, and carries us further towards an understanding of his work than any previous study. Here is a dear and complete solution to the riddles of the longer poems, the so-called "Prophecies," and a demonstration of Blake's insight that will amaze the modern reader. The first section of the book shows how Blake arrived at a theory of knowledge that was also, for him, a theory of religion, of human life and of art, and how this rigorously defined system of ideas found expression in the complicated but consistent symbolism of his poetry. The second and third parts, after indicating the relation of Blake to English literature and the intellectual atmosphere of his own time, explain the meaning of Blake's poems and the significance of their characters.

Preface xi Credits xv Abbreviations xvii Introduction xix The Modem Century 1 The Modern Century 3 I City of the End of Things 5 II Improved Binoculars 27 III Clair de lune intellectuel 48 The Arts 2 Current Opera: A Housecleaning 73 3 Ballet Russe 76 4 The Jooss Ballet 79 5 Frederick Delius 83 6 Three-Cornered Revival at Headington 87 7 Music and the Savage Breast 88 8 Men as Trees Walking 92 9 K.R. Srinivasa’s Lytton Strachey 96 10 The Great Charlie 98 11 Reflections at a Movie 103 12 Music in the Movies O08 13 Max Grafs Modern Music 112 14 Abner Dean’s It’s a Long Way to Heaven 113 15 Russian Art 114 16 Herbert Read’s The Innocent Eye 115 17 The Eternal Tramp 116 18 On Book Reviewing 123 19 Academy without Walls 126 20 Communications 134 21 The Renaissance of Books 140 22 Violence and Television 156 23 Introduction to Art and Reality 167 Politics, History, and Society 24 Pro Patria Mori 175 25 Wyndham Lewis: Anti-Spenglerian 178 26 War on the Cultural Front 184 27 Two Italian Sketches, 1939 I88 28 G.M. Young’s Basic 194 29 Revenge or Justice? 195 30 F.S.C. Northrop’s The Meeting of East and West 197 31 Wallace Notestein’s The Scot in History 201 32 Toynbee and Spengler 202 33 Gandhi 209 34 Ernst Jiinger’s On the Marble Cliffs 211 35 Dr. Kinsey and the Dream Censor 215 36 Cardinal Mindszenty 220 37 The Two Camps 222 38 Law and Disorder 224 39 Two Books on Christianity and History 226 40 Nothing to Fear but Fear 232 41 The Ideal of Democracy 235 42 The Church and Modern Culture 237 43 And There is No Peace 244 44 Caution or Dither? 246 45 Trends in Modern Culture 248 46 Regina versus the World 262 47 Oswald Spengler 265 48 Preserving Human Values 274 49 The War in Vietnam 282 50 The Two Contexts 283 51 The Quality of Life in the ‘7os 285 52 Spengler Revisited 297 53 The Bridge of Language 315 Notes 331 Emendations 381 Index 383

Explores the value and uses of literature in our time. Dr. Frye offers ideas for the teaching of literature at lower school levels, designed both to promote an early interest and to lead the student to the knowledge and experience found in the study of literature.

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.

Modernist writers, critics, and artists sparked a fresh and distinctive interpretation of Shakespeare's plays which has proved remarkably tenacious, as Richard Halpern explains in this lively and provocative book. The preoccupations of such high modernists as T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and James Joyce set the tone for the critical reception of Shakespeare in the twentieth century. Halpern contends their habits of thought continue to dominate postmodern schools of criticism that claim to have broken with the modernist legacy.Halpern addresses such topics as imperialism and modernism's cult of the primitive, the rise of mass culture, modernist anti-semitism, and the aesthetic of the machine. His discussion considers figures as diverse as Orson Welles and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Shakespeare critics including Northrop Frye, Cleanth Brooks, Stephen Greenblatt, and Stanley Cavell. Shakespeare's works have been subjected to a continuing process of historical reinterpretation in which every new era has imposed its own cultural and ideological presuppositions on the plays. The most enduring contribution of modernism, Halpern suggests, has been the juxtaposition of an awareness of historical distance and a mapping of Shakespeare's plays onto the present. Using modernist themes and approaches, he constructs new readings of four Shakespeare plays.