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 With these pieces and the other published and unpublished works contained in the volume, Frye changed the way the transition from the major Augustan figures to the Romantics was viewed. These works are a central part of Frye's long and radical rethinking of the relation of romance and Romanticism and, through them, he emerges as a meticulous textual critic, teasing out the fine brushstroke effects in writers as varied as Boswell and Beddoes, Dickens and Dickinson. Imre Salusinszky's introduction and annotation illuminates Frye's writing and guides the reader along the path of Frye's five-decade development of thought on Romanticism. This volume is an invaluable contribution to studies on Frye, as well as to Romantic and Victorian literature.

Here is a specialized dictionary of quotations based on the thoughts and writings of a single person. It is evidence that there is a Canadian writer of whom it may be said that we as his readers can grow up inside his work "without ever being aware of a circumference."

More than fifty years after the publication of Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye remains one of Canada's most influential intellectuals. This reappraisal reasserts the relevance of his work to the study of literature and illuminates its fruitful intersection with a variety of other fields, including film, cultural studies, linguistics, and feminism. Many of the contributors draw upon the early essays, correspondence, and diaries recently published as part of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye series, in order to explore the development of his extraordinary intellectual range and the implications of his imaginative syntheses. They refute postmodernist arguments that Frye's literary criticism is obsolete and propose his wide-ranging and non-linear ways of thinking as a model for twenty-first century readers searching for innovative ways of understanding literature and its relevance to contiguous disciplines. The volume provides an in-depth examination of Frye's work on a range of literary questions, periods, and genres, as well as a consideration of his contributions to literary theory, philosophy, and theology. The portrait that emerges is that of a writer who still has much to offer those interested in literature and the ways it represents and transforms our world. The book's overall argument is that Frye's case for the centrality of the imagination has never been more important where understanding history, reconciling science and culture, or reconceptualizing social change is concerned.

Myth criticism flourished in the mid-twentieth century under the powerful influence of Canadian thinker Northrop Frye. It asserted the need to identify common, unifying patterns in literature, arts, and religion. Although it was eclipsed by postmodern theories that asserted difference and conflict, those theories proved incapable of inspiring solidarity or guiding social action. The Productions of Time argues for a return to myth criticism in order to refine and extend its vision. With the aim of rehabilitating myth criticism for our time, Michael Dolzani sketches an anatomy of the imagination as demonstrated in the total body of its productions, including literature, mythology, the arts, popular culture, and religious and political texts. Dolzani situates a vast panoply of images, character types, plot structures, themes, and genres to better understand their purposes, their recurrences across broad spans of history, and their interrelations. Illustrating the relationship between mythology and history, The Productions of Time proposes a symbolic language as a way of enabling dialogue across ideological and individual differences. Arguing for the ethical and intellectual necessity of conceiving a unifying pattern that transcends differences, The Productions of Time demonstrates that imagination is part of the human inheritance, common to all, not just to poets and mystics.

"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.

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 collection of Northrop Frye's writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance spans forty years of his career as a university teacher, public critic, and major theorist of literature and its cultural functions. Extensive annotations and an in-depth critical introduction demonstrate Frye's wide-ranging knowledge of Renaissance culture, the pivotal place of the Renaissance in his oeuvre, his impact on Renaissance criticism and on the Stratford Festival, and his continuing importance as a literary theorist. This volume brings together Frye's extensive writings on Shakespeare and other Renaissance writers (excluding Milton, who is featured in other volumes), and includes major articles, introductions, public lectures, and four previously published books on Shakespeare. Frye's insightful analyses offer not just a formidable knowledge of Renaissance culture but also a transformative experience, moving the reader imaginatively towards an experience of created reality.