With the publication of Fearful Symmetry in 1947, Northrop Frye gained wide renown as a literary theorist, a reputation that continued to build throughout his lifetime. This volume in the Collected Works provides a transcription of the seven books of diaries that Frye kept intermittently from 1942 until 1955. During the period of the final six diaries, 1949 - 1955, Frye was at work on Anatomy of Criticism, and he refers frequently to many of the essays written during this period that became a part of the book that brought him international acclaim.

For Frye, diary-writing was a tool...

In the early 1960s, Northrop Frye began keeping notebooks with the aim of creating a critical epic that he referred to as the 'Third Book', a project intended as his third major work following Fearful Symmetry and Anatomy of Criticism. As described by Michael Dolzani, Frye's ambition for the 'Third Book' was for it to become no less than a "symbolic guide to the entire universe." The work he envisioned contemplated the ways in which myth and metaphor are the keys to all verbal structures: how they reach beyond the hypothetical realm of literature to inform, organize, and...

Drawn from previously unpublished essays, talks, reviews and papers, this volume of Northrop Frye's collected works spans some fifty years of his long writing career. The earliest item is a paper on The Canterbury Tales dating from Frye's student days at Oxford. The latest was written in 1989, on the occasion of his receiving his thirty-sixth honorary degree from the University of Bologna.

The center-piece of the collection is Frye's lengthy and ambitious essay, "Rencontre." Intended as an introduction to a never-published anthology of English literature, it is unique in Frye's...

Eradicating once and for all the unfounded notion that Frye was not a political writer, this eleventh volume in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye gathers together all of Northrop Frye's writings on politics, culture, the arts, history, literature, mass media, and music.

Northrop Frye is conceivably Canada's most celebrated literary theorist, but his role in the country's cultural evolution has perhaps been overlooked by later Canadian scholars in favour of his better-known literary criticism. This collection brings together all of the writings of Northrop Frye, both published and heretofore unpublished, on the subject of Canadian literature and culture. From his early book reviews of the 1930s and 1940s through his explorations of the patterns of Canadian literature in the fifties, to his cultural commentaries of the sixties, seventies, and eighties...

Northrop Frye's expansive and influential lectures on the literary symbolism of the Bible given during 1981-2 are arguably among his best and most accessible works. This thirteenth volume in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye gathers together these lectures and Frye's notebooks on the Bible, Dante, and Eastern religion. The eleven holograph notebooks and the twenty-four lectures transcribed here present new insights into Frye's personality, methods, and thought, and complement the other published editions of Frye's notebooks in this series, The Late Notebooks (2000) and The...

Highlighting aspects of his scholarship seldom given sufficient emphasis, this new volume of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye documents Frye's writings on the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (apart from those on William Blake, which are featured in other volumes).

The volume includes Frye's seminal 1956 essay "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility" and the highly influential 1968 book A Study of English Romanticism. With these pieces and the other published and unpublished works contained in the volume, Frye changed the way the transition from the major...

The writings of John Milton and William Blake were central to Northrop Frye's concept of the imaginative structure of Western literature and thought. He considered them the two most important poet-prophets in the English tradition.

This volume brings together all of Frye's writings on Milton and Blake from 1947 to 1987 - published and unpublished essays, reviews, commentaries, and public lectures - with the exception of Fearful Symmetry (published as Volume 14 of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye). During this time, Frye's engagement with Milton moved outward from the...

Romance was a theme that ran through much of Northrop Frye's corpus, and his notebooks and typed notes on the subject are plentiful. This unpublished material, written between 1944 and 1989, traces a remarkable re-evaluation in his thinking over the course of time. As a young scholar, Frye insisted that romance was an expression of cultural decadence; however, in his later years, he thought of it as "the structural core of all fiction."

The unpublished material Michael Dolzani has gathered for Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Romance shows how the pattern and conventions of...

An inveterate notebook keeper, Northrop Frye continually jotted down his ideas and thoughts as he worked through the complex schemes of his criticism. Volumes 5 and 6 of the Collected Works are the notebooks that he kept while writing his two final books, "Words with Power" and "The Double Vision." They provide a record of what he was reading and thinking as he struggled with the implications of those projects. In a sense they are the workshops out of which the books were constructed.

While focusing on the works-in-progress, the 3684 entries presented here range over diverse...