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...

In the Alexander Lectures for 1965-66 at the University of Toronto, Dr. Frye describes the basis of the tragic vision as "being in time," in which death as "the essential event that gives shape and form to life ... defines the individual, and marks him off from the continuity of life that flows indefinitely between the past and the future."

In Dr. Frye's view, three general types can be distinguished in Shakespearean tragedy, the tragedy of order, the tragedy of passion, and the tragedy of isolation, in all of which a pattern of "being in time" shapes the action. In the first type,...

Here Professor Frye analyses the way in which the structure and imagery of literature have been affected by the complex of ideas and images surrounding the word 'creation.' Traditionally, everything associated with nature, reality, settled order, the way things are, is supposed to go back to the creation, the original divine act of making the world. If the word 'creative' is applied to human activities, the humanly creative is whatever profoundly disturbs our sense of 'the' creation, a reversing or neutralizing of it. What seems to be one of the few admirable forms of human achievement,...

The publication in 1982 of Northrop Frye's The Great Code: The Bible and Literature was a literary event of major significance. Frye took what he called 'a fresh and firsthand look' at the Bible and analysed it as a literary critic, exploring its relation to Western literature and its impact on the creative imagination. Through an examination of such key aspects of language as myth, metaphor, and rhetoric he conveyed to the reader the results of his own encounter with the Bible and his appreciation of its unified structure of narrative and imagery.

Shortly before his death...

The late Northrop Frye is Canada's best-known literary and cultural critic, and one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century. During his lifetime, Frye developed a profoundly religious epistemology that informed and infused much of what he wrote. In bringing together his writings on the Bible and religion, this volume offers many keys to the dynamic essence of Frye's thought.

Well-organized, insightfully introduced, and carefully edited, this scholarly, annotated edition covers nearly the full range of Frye's intensive intellectual work on religion. (The Great Code and...

This philosophic inquiry into fundamental problems of literature and society is an immensely important addition to the canon of one of America s most original and distinguished critics. What is the function of poetry? Of criticism? In what sense does the poet "know"? What is the relationship between a society and its art? Northrop Frye conducts us on an illuminating survey of these and other broad philosophic issues and offers many incidental insights into specific cultural phenomena as well. Such matters as Marxist aesthetics, Renaissance humanism, the relation of poetry to religion, the...

This collection of a dozen major essays written in recent year is vintage Frye--the fine distillation of a lifetime of originative thinking about literature and its context. The essays in Spiritus Mundi--the title comes from one of Yeat's best known poems, "The Second Coming," and refers to the book that was supposedly the source of Yeat's apocalyptic vision of a "great beast, slouching toward Bethlehem"--are arranges in three groups of four essays each. The first four are about the "contexts of literature," the second are about the "mythological universe," and the last are studies of four...

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...