Background
Herman Northrop Frye was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, on July 14, 1912.
( In these essays Northrop Frye addresses a question whic...)
In these essays Northrop Frye addresses a question which preoccupied him throughout his long and distinguished career the conception of comedy, particularly Shakespearean comedy, and its relation to human experience. In most forms of comedy, and certainly in the New Comedy with which Shakespeare was concerned, the emphasis is on moving towards a climax in which the end incorporates the beginning. Such a climax is a vision of deliverance or expanded energy and freedom. Frye draws on the Aristotelian notion of reversal, or peripeteia, to analyse the three plays commonly known as the 'problem comedies': Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well, and Troilus and Cressida, showing how they anticipate the romances of Shakespeare's final period.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0802077811/?tag=2022091-20
( Frye continues his exploration, begun in The Great Code...)
Frye continues his exploration, begun in The Great Code, of the influence of Biblical themes and forms of expression on Western literature, with discussions of authors ranging from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Yeats and Eliot. Frye identifies four key elements found in the Bible-the mountain, the garden, the cave, and the furnace-and describes how they recur in later secular writings. Indices.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0156983656/?tag=2022091-20
( Addressed to educators and general readers?the "consume...)
Addressed to educators and general readers?the "consumers of literature" from all walks of life?this important new book explores the value and uses of literature in our time. Dr. Frye offers, in addition, challenging and stimulating 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 kaleidoscopic experience found in the study of literature. Dr. Frye's proposals for the teaching of literature include an early emphasis on poetry, the "central and original literary form," intensive study of the Bible, as literature, and the Greek and Latin classics, as these embody all the great enduring themes of western man, and study of the great literary forms: tragedy and comedy, romance and irony.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0253200881/?tag=2022091-20
( This collection of twenty-four of Northrop Frye's essay...)
This collection of twenty-four of Northrop Frye's essays, nine of which have never been published and several of which have appeared only in obscure sources, focuses on the fundamental themes that have dominated Frye's career and made him one of the world's most influential critics.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0813913691/?tag=2022091-20
( Striking out at the conception of criticism as restrict...)
Striking out at the conception of criticism as restricted to mere opinion or ritual gesture, Northrop Frye wrote this magisterial work proceeding on the assumption that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge in its own right. In four brilliant essays on historical, ethical, archetypical, and rhetorical criticism, employing examples of world literature from ancient times to the present, Frye reconceived literary criticism as a total history rather than a linear progression through time. Literature, Frye wrote, is "the place where our imaginations find the ideal that they try to pass on to belief and action, where they find the vision which is the source of both the dignity and the joy of life." And the critical study of literature provides a basic way "to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in." Harold Bloom contributes a fascinating and highly personal preface that examines Frye's mode of criticism and thought (as opposed to Frye's criticism itself) as being indispensable in the modern literary world.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691069999/?tag=2022091-20
( One of the greatest literary critics of our time here p...)
One of the greatest literary critics of our time here provides a remarkable introduction to the genius of William Shakespeare through a study of ten of Shakespeares most popular plays: A Midsummer Nights Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Henry IV, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winters Tale, and The Tempest. The outgrowth of a lifetime of study and teaching, Fryes insights will inform and delight both the expert and the first-time reader of Shakespeare. The sensibility and wisdom informing the book make it a delight.?S. Schoenbaum, New York Times Book Review The most accessible and sheerly enjoyable of Fryes books .The effect is that of listening to a fluent, genial conversationalist who loves Shakespeare and unabashedly celebrates him in that high aspect of criticism well called appreciation.?Edmund Fuller, Wall Street Journal A boon to both Shakespearean scholars and readers dipping into the Bards work for the first time. Written with verve, erudition and more-than-occasional humor, this summing-up of 50 years of scholarship will be read with pleasure, profit and gratitude by drama lovers for years to come.?Kirkus Reviews Northrop Frye, professor of English, has been on the faculty of the University of Toronto for almost fifty years. He is the author of numerous books, including the seminal work Anatomy of Criticism
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300042086/?tag=2022091-20
Herman Northrop Frye was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, on July 14, 1912.
After the failure of his father's hardware business, his family moved to Moncton, New Brunswick, where he completed his primary and secondary education. His skill as a typist brought him to Toronto to compete in an Underwood-sponsored contest in 1929. He enrolled in Victoria College of the University of Toronto.
While still an undergraduate, he developed a deep fascination with the complex poetic prophecies of William Blake, particularly Milton, The Four Zoas, and Jerusalem, considered by many scholars to be the product of an eccentric, possibly insane, visionary. In Frye's first year of graduate work, in which he took concurrent training as a minister for the United Church of Canada (primarily Methodist), Frye decided to write a definitive book on Blake which would break Blake's difficult symbolic code. This near obsession sustained him through two unhappy years of graduate work at Merton College, Oxford, where he studied with poet Edmund Blunden in 1936-1937 and 1938-1939, after which he taught English at Victoria College for over four decades.
Heavily influenced by British scholars of myth, particularly James Frazer, he worked diligently on the Blake book from 1934 to 1945, finally producing Fearful Symmetry. Published in 1947, it is still considered the definitive reading of Blake. It shows that Blake's poetic universe was not psychotically personal but had close affinities with other major poetry. Basically Frye proposed that all literature fit into a grand apocalyptic pattern of heaven and hell. Aspects of literary expression such as tragedy (the Fall), irony (unrelieved hell), romance (resurrection), and comedy (communal reconciliation) form an interconnected circular pattern analogous to the Last Judgment or the wheel of fortune motifs common in medieval art.
Because Frye considered that the ideas he developed through Blake were unusually relevant to literary theory generally, he wrote a series of articles in the early 1950s suggesting how academic critics and students of literature could greatly improve their comprehension of their subject. He suggested the development of a standard symbolic and rhetorical terminology similar to that of musical studies. He spurned any evaluative, aesthetic factors as too subjective. Although Frye himself primarily studied Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens, he considered all literature relevant, including folk tales, detective novels, and science fiction. He combined his ideas for the reform of literary studies in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), probably the most influential book of criticism written in English in the 20th century. It has been translated into many languages.
While important, the Anatomy of Criticism is a difficult book intended for professional scholars. Frye produced a much simpler book for general readers, The Educated Imagination, in 1963. He also developed a strong populist interest in the 1960s in reforming the way literature was studied and taught in the schools. A major New York publisher produced a series of readers for grades seven to 12, Uses of the Imagination, based on Frye's ideas. Two college anthologies were also developed.
While Frye hoped to write a sequel to the Anatomy of Criticism, he became too busy with the practical implications of his ideas to concentrate on it. In 1971 he finally settled on a book on the Bible's influence on English literature as a third major work. As with his first two major books, he took a decade to produce The Great Code (1982), and, like the others, it was both controversial and best selling in university circles. It was even number two on the Canadian non-fiction best selling list for six weeks. Frye's basic point was that the Bible has provided the basic patterns of symbolism and imagery for nearly all of the literature of western cultures. As a result, the Bible must be carefully read and studied by all students of literature. Frye then began work on a sequel, Words with Power (1990), showing how English literature has heavily borrowed its structural forms from the Bible.
Words with Power was the last of forty books of literary criticism written by Frye. The work is a study of the relationship of Biblical language to the language and thought of mythology, literature, and everyday life. "In the course of this book, as he reverses direction from secularizing sacred scriptures to spiritualizing secular ones, his own language moves from the descriptive, the conceptual and the rhetorical to the language of proclamation and prophecy, " wrote Steven Marx of Cal Poly University. "This confirms a sense that he is returning to his early vocation as a preacher and also suggests that like the authors he prefers, in interpreting the Bible, Northrop Frye is remaking it his owns. "
Frye died in Toronto Jan. 23, 1991 of an apparent heart attack following a recent diagnosis of cancer. He was 78. Writing in America, July 6, 1991, on the occasion of Frye's death, former student John P. McIntyre remembered the professor's ability for "showing off his students, letting them know that they really were better than they knew.
To honor Frye and his work, The Northrop Frye Centre was established in 1988 at Victoria University in the University of Toronto. The goals of the centre are to encourage research in the human sciences and the dissemination of humanist scholarship. The centre offers a fellowship program as well as programs by which scholars may become visiting fellows or associates of the centre. The Collected Works of Northrop Frye is expected to be published by the University of Toronto Press in 32 volumes. Drawing on the vast collection of Frye's papers in the Pratt Library of Victoria College, the collection will include an extensive selection of unpublished works, diaries, letters, early essays, speeches, fiction, and notebooks.
( One of the greatest literary critics of our time here p...)
( This collection of twenty-four of Northrop Frye's essay...)
( Striking out at the conception of criticism as restrict...)
( Frye continues his exploration, begun in The Great Code...)
( In these essays Northrop Frye addresses a question whic...)
( Addressed to educators and general readers?the "consume...)
In Frye's first year of graduate work, in which he took concurrent training as a minister for the United Church of Canada (primarily Methodist), Frye decided to write a definitive book on Blake which would break Blake's difficult symbolic code.
The goals of the centre are to encourage research in the human sciences and the dissemination of humanist scholarship.
He was an Honorary Fellow or Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Merton College, Oxford, British Academy, American Philosophical Society and American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Frye married Helen Kemp, an educator, editor and artist, in 1937. She died in Australia while accompanying Frye on a lecture tour. Two years after her death in 1986, he married Elizabeth Brown.