Northrop Frye

Canadian literary theorist

The Reverend

Northrop Frye

CC FRSC

File:Northrop Frye.jpg

Frye in 1984

Born|

Herman Northrop Frye

(1912-07-14)July 14, 1912

Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada

Died| January 23, 1991(1991-01-23) (aged 78)

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Spouses|

* Helen Kemp Frye

(m. 1937; died 1986)​

* Elizabeth Brown Frye

(m. 1988)​

Ecclesiastical career
Religion| Christianity
Church| United Church of Canada
Ordained| 1936
Academic background
Alma mater|

* Victoria College, Toronto
* Emmanuel College, Toronto
* Merton College, Oxford

Influences|

* William Blake
* F. R. Leavis
* I. A. Richards
* Oswald Spengler
* Giambattista Vico

Academic work
Discipline| English
Sub-discipline|

* Literary criticism
* literary theory

School or tradition|

* Archetypal literary criticism
* Romanticism
* Toronto School of communication theory

Institutions| Victoria College, Toronto
Main interests|

* Imagination
* archetype
* myth
* Bible

Notable works| Anatomy of Criticism (1957)
Notable ideas|

* Archetypes of literature
* classless culture[1]
* garrison mentality

Influenced|

* Margaret Atwood
* Harold Bloom
* Fredric Jameson
* B. W. Powe

Herman Northrop Frye CC FRSC (July 14, 1912 - January 23, 1991) was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.

Frye gained international fame with his first book, Fearful Symmetry (1947), which led to the reinterpretation of the poetry of William Blake. His lasting reputation rests principally on the theory of literary criticism that he developed in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), one of the most important works of literary theory published in the twentieth century. The American critic Harold Bloom commented at the time of its publication that Anatomy established Frye as "the foremost living student of Western literature."[2] Frye's contributions to cultural and social criticism spanned a long career during which he earned widespread recognition and received many honours.

## Contents

* 1 Biography
* 1.1 Early life and education
* 1.2 Academic and writing career
* 1.3 Family life
* 2 Contribution to literary criticism
* 2.1 Criticism as a science
* 2.2 Frye's conceptual framework for literature
* 2.3 The order of words
* 2.4 A theory of the imagination
* 2.5 Frye's critical method
* 2.6 Archetypal criticism as "a new poetics"
* 2.7 Influences: Vico and Blake
* 2.8 Contribution to the theorizing of Canada
* 2.8.1 Study of literary productions
* 3 Awards and honours
* 4 Works by Northrop Frye
* 5 References
* 6 Sources
* 7 External links

## Biography[edit | edit source]

### Early life and education[edit | edit source]

Born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, but raised in Moncton, New Brunswick, Frye was the third child of Herman Edward Frye and of Catherine Maud Howard.[3] His much older brother, Howard, died in World War I; he also had a sister, Vera.[4] His first cousin was the scientist Alma Howard. Frye went to Toronto to compete in a national typing contest in 1929.[5] He studied for his undergraduate degree in philosophy at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where he edited the college literary journal, Acta Victoriana.[6] He then studied theology at Emmanuel College (like Victoria College, a constituent part of the University of Toronto). After a brief stint as a student minister in Saskatchewan, he was ordained to the ministry of the United Church of Canada. He then studied at Merton College, Oxford,[7] where he was a member and Secretary of the Bodley Club[8] before returning to Victoria College, where he spent the remainder of his professional career.[citation needed]

### Academic and writing career[edit | edit source]

Frye rose to international prominence as a result of his first book, Fearful Symmetry, published in 1947. Until then, the prophetic poetry of William Blake had long been poorly understood, and considered by some to be delusional ramblings. Frye found in it a system of metaphor derived from Paradise Lost and the Bible. His study of Blake's poetry was a major contribution to the subject. Moreover, Frye outlined an innovative manner of studying literature that was to deeply influence the study of literature in general. He was a major influence on Harold Bloom, Margaret Atwood, and others.[citation needed]

In 1974–1975 Frye was the Norton professor at Harvard University. But his primary position was as a professor at the University of Toronto, and then chancellor of Victoria College in the University of Toronto.[9]

Northrop Frye did not have a PhD.[10]

The intelligence service of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police spied on Frye, watching his participation in the anti–Vietnam War movement, an academic forum about China, and activism to end South African apartheid.[11]

### Family life[edit | edit source]

Frye married Helen Kemp, an educator, editor and artist, in 1937. She died in Australia while accompanying Frye on a lecture tour.[12] Two years after her death in 1986, he married Elizabeth Brown.[3] He died in 1991 and was interred in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto, Ontario.

## Contribution to literary criticism[edit | edit source]

The insights gained from his study of Blake set Frye on his critical path and shaped his contributions to literary criticism and theory. He was the first critic to postulate a systematic theory of criticism, "to work out," in his own words, "a unified commentary on the theory of literary criticism" (Stubborn Structure 160). In so doing, he shaped the discipline of criticism. Inspired by his work on Blake, Frye developed and articulated his unified theory ten years after Fearful Symmetry, in the Anatomy of Criticism (1957). He described this as an attempt at a "synoptic view of the scope, theory, principles, and techniques of literary criticism" (Anatomy 3). He asked, "what if criticism is a science as well as an art?" (7), Thus, Frye launched the pursuit which was to occupy the rest of his career—that of establishing criticism as a "coherent field of study which trains the imagination quite as systematically and efficiently as the sciences train the reason" (Hamilton 34).

### Criticism as a science[edit | edit source]

As A. C. Hamilton outlines in Northrop Frye: Anatomy of his Criticism, Frye's assumption of coherence for literary criticism carries important implications. Firstly and most fundamentally, it presupposes that literary criticism is a discipline in its own right, independent of literature. Claiming with John Stuart Mill that "the artist… is not heard but overheard," Frye insists that

> The axiom of criticism must be, not that the poet does not know what he is talking about, but that he cannot talk about what he knows. To defend the right of criticism to exist at all, therefore, is to assume that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge existing in its own right, with some measure of independence from the art it deals with (Anatomy 5).

[citation needed]

This "declaration of independence" (Hart xv) is necessarily a measured one for Frye. For coherence requires that the autonomy of criticism, the need to eradicate its conception as "a parasitic form of literary expression,… a second-hand imitation of creative power" (Anatomy 3), sits in dynamic tension with the need to establish integrity for it as a discipline. For Frye, this kind of coherent, critical integrity involves claiming a body of knowledge for criticism that, while independent of literature, is yet constrained by it: "If criticism exists," he declares, "it must be an examination of literature in terms of a conceptual framework derivable from an inductive survey of the literary field" itself (Anatomy 7).

### Frye's conceptual framework for literature[edit | edit source]

In seeking integrity for criticism, Frye rejects what he termed the deterministic fallacy. He defines this as the movement of "a scholar with a special interest in geography or economics [to] express . . . that interest by the rhetorical device of putting his favorite study into a causal relationship with whatever interests him less" (Anatomy 6). By attaching criticism to an external framework rather than locating the framework for criticism within literature, this kind of critic essentially "substitute[s] a critical attitude for criticism." For Frye critical integrity means that "the axioms and postulates of criticism . . . have to grow out of the art it deals with" (Anatomy 6).

File:Northrop Frye Hall.JPG

Northrop Frye Hall, University of Toronto

Taking his cue from Aristotle, Frye's methodology in defining a conceptual framework begins inductively, "follow[ing] the natural order and begin[ning] with the primary facts" (Anatomy 15). The primary facts, in this case, are the works of literature themselves. And what did Frye's inductive survey of these facts reveal? Significantly, they revealed "a general tendency on the part of great classics to revert to [primitive formulas]" (Anatomy 17). This revelation prompted his next move, or rather, 'inductive leap':

> I suggest that it is time for criticism to leap to a new ground from which it can discover what the organizing or containing forms of its conceptual framework are. Criticism seems to be badly in need of a coordinating principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomena it deals with as parts of a whole (Anatomy 16).

Arguing that "criticism cannot be a systematic [and thus scientific] study unless there is a quality in literature which enables it to be so," Frye puts forward the hypothesis that "just as there is an order of nature behind the natural sciences, so literature is not a piled aggregate of 'works,' but an order of words" (Anatomy 17). This order of words constitutes criticism's conceptual framework, its coordinating principle.

### The order of words[edit | edit source]

The recurring primitive formulas Frye noticed in his survey of the "greatest classics" provide literature with an order of words, a "skeleton" which allows the reader "to respond imaginatively to any literary work by seeing it in the larger perspective provided by its literary and social contexts" (Hamilton 20). Frye identifies these formulas as the "conventional myths and metaphors" which he calls "archetypes" (Spiritus Mundi 118). The archetypes of literature exist, Frye argues, as an order of words, providing criticism with a conceptual framework and a body of knowledge derived not from an ideological system but rooted in the imagination itself. Thus, rather than interpreting literary works from some ideological 'position' — what Frye calls the "superimposed critical attitude" (Anatomy 7) — criticism instead finds integrity within the literary field itself.

Criticism for Frye, then, is not a task of evaluation — that is, of rejecting or accepting a literary work — but rather simply of recognizing it for what it is and understanding it in relation to other works within the 'order of words' [13] (Cotrupi 4). Imposing value judgments on literature belongs, according to Frye, "only to the history of taste, and therefore follows the vacillations of fashionable prejudice" (Anatomy 9). Genuine criticism "progresses toward making the whole of literature intelligible" (Anatomy 9) so that its goal is ultimately knowledge and not evaluation. For the critic in Frye's mode, then,

> ... a literary work should be contemplated as a pattern of knowledge, an act that must be distinguished, at least initially, from any direct experience of the work, . . . [Thus] criticism begins when reading ends: no longer imaginatively subjected to a literary work, the critic tries to make sense out of it, not by going to some historical context or by commenting on the immediate experience of reading but by seeing its structure within literature and literature within culture (Hamilton 27).

### A theory of the imagination[edit | edit source]

Once asked whether his critical theory was Romantic, Frye responded, "Oh, it's entirely Romantic, yes" (Stingle 1). It is Romantic in the same sense that Frye attributed Romanticism to Blake: that is, "in the expanded sense of giving a primary place to imagination and individual feeling" (Stingle 2). As artifacts of the imagination, literary works, including "the pre-literary categories of ritual, myth, and folk-tale" (Archetypes 1450) form, in Frye's vision, a potentially unified imaginative experience. He reminds us that literature is the "central and most important extension" of mythology: "... every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature" (Words with Power xiii). Mythology and literature thus inhabit and function within the same imaginative world, one that is "governed by conventions, by its own modes, symbols, myths and genres" (Hart 23). Integrity for criticism requires that it too operates within the sphere of the imagination, and not seek an organizing principle in ideology. To do so, claims Frye,

> ... leaves out the central structural principles that literature derives from myth, the principles that give literature its communicating power across the centuries through all ideological changes. Such structural principles are certainly conditioned by social and historical factors and do not transcend them, but they retain a continuity of form that points to an identity of the literary organism distinct from all its adaptations to its social environment (Words with Power xiii).

Myth therefore provides structure to literature simply because literature as a whole is "displaced mythology" (Bates 21).[citation needed] Hart makes the point well when he states that "For Frye, the story, and not the argument, is at the centre of literature and society. The base of society is mythical and narrative and not ideological and dialectical" (19). This idea, which is central in Frye's criticism, was first suggested to him by Giambattista Vico.

### Frye's critical method[edit | edit source]

Frye uses the terms 'centripetal' and 'centrifugal' to describe his critical method. Criticism, Frye explains, is essentially centripetal when it moves inwardly, towards the structure of a text; it is centrifugal when it moves outwardly, away from the text and towards society and the outer world. Lyric poetry, for instance, like Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn", is dominantly centripetal, stressing the sound and movement and imagery of the ordered words. Rhetorical novels, like Uncle Tom's Cabin, are dominantly centrifugal, stressing the thematic connection of the stories and characters to the social order. The "Ode" has centrifugal tendencies, relying for its effects on elements of history and pottery and visual aesthetics. Cabin has centripetal tendencies, relying on syntax and lexical choice to delineate characters and establish mood. But the one veers inward, the other pushes outward. Criticism reflects these movements, centripetally focusing on the aesthetic function of literature, centrifugally on the social function of literature.

While some critics or schools of criticism emphasize one movement over the other, for Frye, both movements are essential: "criticism will always have two aspects, one turned toward the structure of literature and one turned toward the other cultural phenomena that form the social environment of literature" (Critical Path 25). He would therefore agree, at least in part, with the New Critics of his day in their centripetal insistence on structural analysis. But for Frye this is only part of the story: "It is right," he declares, "that the first effort of critical apprehension should take the form of a rhetorical or structural analysis of a work of art. But a purely structural approach has the same limitation in criticism that it has in biology." That is, it doesn't develop "any explanation of how the structure came to be what it was and what its nearest relatives are. Structural analysis brings rhetoric back to criticism, but we need a new poetics as well . . ." (Archetypes 1447).

### Archetypal criticism as "a new poetics"[edit | edit source]

Main article: Archetypal literary criticism

For Frye, this "new poetics" is to be found in the principle of the mythological framework, which has come to be known as 'archetypal criticism'. It is through the lens of this framework, which is essentially a centrifugal movement of backing up from the text towards the archetype, that the social function of literary criticism becomes apparent. Essentially, "what criticism can do," according to Frye, "is awaken students to successive levels of awareness of the mythology that lies behind the ideology in which their society indoctrinates them" (Stingle 5). That is, the study of recurring structural patterns grants students an emancipatory distance from their own society, and gives them a vision of a higher human state — the Longinian sublime — that is not accessible directly through their own experience, but ultimately transforms and expands their experience, so that the poetic model becomes a model to live by. In what he terms a "kerygmatic mode," myths become "myths to live by" and metaphors "metaphors to live in," which ". . . not only work for us but constantly expand our horizons, [so that] we may enter the world of [kerygma or transformative power] and pass on to others what we have found to be true for ourselves" (Double Vision 18).

Because of its important social function, Frye felt that literary criticism was an essential part of a liberal education, and worked tirelessly to communicate his ideas to a wider audience. "For many years now," he wrote in 1987, "I have been addressing myself primarily, not to other critics, but to students and a nonspecialist public, realizing that whatever new directions can come to my discipline will come from their needs and their intense if unfocused vision" (Auguries 7). It is therefore fitting that his last book, published posthumously, should be one that he describes as being "something of a shorter and more accessible version of the longer books, The Great Code and Words with Power," which he asks his readers to read sympathetically, not "as proceeding from a judgment seat of final conviction, but from a rest stop on a pilgrimage, however near the pilgrimage may now be to its close" (Double Vision Preface).

### Influences: Vico and Blake[edit | edit source]

Vico, in The New Science, posited a view of language as fundamentally figurative, and introduced into Enlightenment discourse the notion of the role of the imagination in creating meaning. For Vico, poetic discourse is prior to philosophical discourse; philosophy is in fact derivative of poetry. Frye readily acknowledged the debt he owed to Vico in developing his literary theory, describing him as "the first modern thinker to understand that all major verbal structures have descended historically from poetic and mythological ones" (Words with Power xii).

However, it was Blake, Frye's "Virgilian guide" (Stingle 1), who first awakened Frye to the "mythological frame of our culture" [13] (Cotrupi 14). In fact, Frye claims that his "second book [Anatomy] was contained in embryo in the first [Fearful Symmetry]" (Stubborn Structure 160). For it was in reflecting on the similarity between Blake and Milton that Frye first stumbled upon the "principle of the mythological framework," the recognition that "the Bible was a mythological framework, cosmos or body of stories, and that societies live within a mythology" (Hart 18). Blake thus led Frye to the conviction that the Bible provided Western societies with the mythology which informed all of Western literature. As Hamilton asserts, "Blake's claim that 'the Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art' became the central doctrine of all [Frye's] criticism" (39). This 'doctrine' found its fullest expression in Frye's appropriately named The Great Code, which he described as "a preliminary investigation of Biblical structure and typology" whose purpose was ultimately to suggest "how the structure of the Bible, as revealed by its narrative and imagery, was related to the conventions and genres of Western literature" (Words with Power xi).

### Contribution to the theorizing of Canada[edit | edit source]

During the 1950s, Frye wrote annual surveys of Canadian poetry for the University of Toronto Quarterly, which led him to observe recurrent themes and preoccupations in Canadian poetry.[14] Subsequently, Frye elaborated on these observations, especially in his conclusion to Carl F. Klinck's Literary History of Canada (1965). In this work, Frye presented the idea of the "garrison mentality" as the attitude from which Canadian literature has been written. The garrison mentality is the attitude of a member of a community that feels isolated from cultural centres and besieged by a hostile landscape.[15] Frye maintained that such communities were peculiarly Canadian, and fostered a literature that was formally immature, that displayed deep moral discomfort with "uncivilized" nature, and whose narratives reinforced social norms and values.[15]

Frye also aided James Polk in compiling Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture (1982).[16] In the posthumous Collected Works of Northrop Frye, his writings on Canada occupy the thick 12th volume.[17]

Garrison mentality

Frye collected his disparate writings on Canadian writing and painting in The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (1971). He coined phrases like the Garrison Mentality, a theme that summarizes Canadian literature. Margaret Atwood adopted his approach and elaborated on this in her book Survival (1972).[18]

Canadian identity in literature

Based on his observations of Canadian literature, Frye concluded that, by extension, Canadian identity was defined by a fear of nature, by the history of settlement and by unquestioned adherence to the community. However, Frye perceived the ability and advisability of Canadian (literary) identity to move beyond these characteristics. Frye proposed the possibility of movement beyond the literary constraints of the garrison mentality: growing urbanization, interpreted as greater control over the environment, would produce a society with sufficient confidence for its writers to compose more formally advanced detached literature.[19]

#### Study of literary productions[edit | edit source]

Frye's international reputation allowed him to champion Canadian literature at a time when to do so was considered provincial. Frye argued that regardless of the formal quality of the writing, it was imperative to study Canadian literary productions in order to understand the Canadian imagination and its reaction to the Canadian environment.[20]

## Awards and honours[edit | edit source]

File:Northrop Frye statue.JPG

Northrop Frye statue outside the entrance of Moncton Public Library at Blue Cross Centre

Frye was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1951 and awarded the Royal Society's Lorne Pierce Medal (1958) and its Pierre Chauveau Medal (1970). He was named University Professor by the University of Toronto in 1967. He won the Canada Council Molson Prize in 1971, and the Royal Bank Award in 1978. In 1987 he received the Governor General's Literary Award and the Toronto Arts Lifetime Achievement Award.[21] He was an Honorary Fellow or Member of the following:

* American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1969)
* Merton College, Oxford (1974)
* British Academy (1975)
* American Philosophical Society (1976), and
* American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1981).[21]

Northrop Frye was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1972.[22] In 2000, he was honoured by the government of Canada with his image on a postage stamp. An international literary festival The Frye Festival, named in Frye's honour, takes place every April in Moncton, New Brunswick.

The Northrop Frye Centre, part of Victoria College at the University of Toronto, was named in his honour,[23] as was the Humanities Stream of the Vic One Program at Victoria College and the Northrop Frye Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto.

Northrop Frye School in Moncton was named in his honour. A statue shows Frye sitting on a park bench outside the entrance to the Moncton Public Library.[24] Another casting of the statue and bench by artists Darren Byers and Fred Harrison sits at Victoria College at the University of Toronto.[25]

Frye was named a National Historic Person in 2018.[26]

## Works by Northrop Frye[edit | edit source]

The following is a list of his books, including the volumes in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye, an ongoing project under the editorship of Alvin A. Lee.

* Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake
* Anatomy of Criticism
* The Educated Imagination
* Fables of Identity
* T. S. Eliot
* The Well-Tempered Critic
* A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance
* The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton's Epics
* Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy
* The Modern Century
* A Study of English Romanticism
* The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society
* The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination
* The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism
* The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance
* Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society
* Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature: A Collection of Review Essays
* Creation and Recreation
* The Great Code: The Bible and Literature
* Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture
* The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare's Problem Comedies
* Harper Handbook to Literature (with Sheridan Baker and George W. Perkins)
* On Education
* No Uncertain Sounds
* Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays
* Words with Power: Being a Second Study of The Bible and Literature
* Reading the World: Selected Writings
* The Double Vision of Language, Nature, Time, and God
* A World in a Grain of Sand: Twenty-Two Interviews with Northrop Frye
* Reflections on the Canadian Literary Imagination: A Selection of Essays by Northrop Frye
* Mythologizing Canada: Essays on the Canadian Literary Imagination
* Northrop Frye on Shakespeare
* Northrop Frye in Conversation (an interview with David Cayley)
* The Eternal Act of Creation
* Collected Works of Northrop Frye
* Northrop Frye on Religion

Beyond these publications, Frye edited fifteen books, composed essays and chapters that appear in over sixty books, and wrote over one hundred articles and reviews in academic journals. From 1950 to 1960 he wrote the annual critical and bibliographical survey of Canadian poetry for Letters in Canada, University of Toronto Quarterly.

## References[edit | edit source]

1. ^ Denham, Robert D. (compiler), Northrop Frye: An Enumerative Bibliography, Scarecrow Press, 1974, p. 68.
2. ^ Forst, G.N. (Winter 2007). "Anatomy of Imagination." Canadian Literature #195, Context(e)s. (pp. 141–43). Retrieved on: October 20, 2011.
3. ^ a b University of Toronto. Guide to the Northrop Frye papers. Victoria University Library Special Collections (F 11) Northrop Frye fonds. Retrieved on: November 30, 2008.
4. ^ Herman Northrop Frye Archived 2017-07-23 at the Wayback Machine. New Brunswick literary Encyclopedia.
5. ^ Ayre, J. "Frye, Herman Northrop". The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Foundation.
6. ^ "Acta victoriana".
7. ^ Levens, R.G.C., ed. (1964). Merton College Register 1900–1964. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. p. 274.
8. ^ Frye, Northrop (2001). Denham, Robert D. (ed.). Diaries. University of Toronto Press. ISBN 0-8020-3538-8.
9. ^ "Northrop Frye Fonds 11". E.J. Pratt Library. Retrieved 29 October 2019.
10. ^ "B. W. Powe | Figure/Ground Communication". Archived from the original on 2012-07-01. Retrieved 2012-07-23.
11. ^ "RCMP spied on Northrop Frye". CBC News. 24 July 2011. Retrieved 26 September 2014.
12. ^ University of Toronto. Helen Kemp Frye (1910-1986). Victoria University Library Special Collections (F12) Helen Kemp Frye fonds. Retrieved on: November 30, 2008.
13. ^ a b Cotrupi, Caterina N., Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.) ISBN 978-0-8020-8141-4
14. ^ Hutcheon, Linda; Northrop Frye (1995). Introduction: Field Notes of a Public Critic, The Bush Garden. Toronto: Anansi. pp. ix.
15. ^ a b Frye, Northrop; Carl F. Klinck (1965). Conclusion, Literary History of Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. p. 342.
16. ^ For a critical discussion on Canadianness see: Marc A. Bauch: Canadian Self-Perception and Self-Representation in English-Canadian Drama after 1967. Wiku-Verlag, Köln 2012. ISBN 3-865534-07-4
17. ^ Frye, Northrop (2003). Jean O'Grady; David Staines (eds.). Collected Works of Northrop Frye Volume 12: Northrop Frye on Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
18. ^ Marc A. Bauch: Canadian Self-Perception and Self-Representation in English-Canadian Drama after 1967. Wiku-Verlag, Köln 2012. ISBN 3-865534-07-4
19. ^ Frye, Northrop; Carl F. Klinck (1965). Conclusion, Literary History of Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. p. 351.
20. ^ Frye, Northrop; Carl F. Klinck (1965). Conclusion, Literary History of Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. p. 334.
21. ^ a b Northrop Frye Archived 2019-03-29 at the Wayback Machine at Victoria College, University of Toronto. Retrieved on: November 30, 2008.
22. ^ Harry Palmer Gallery. Northrop Frye Archived 2008-09-27 at the Wayback Machine. Companions of the Order of Canada Gallery E-H. Retrieved on: November 30, 2008.
23. ^ University of Toronto. University of Victoria, Northrop Frye Centre Archived 2010-01-30 at the Wayback Machine.
24. ^ Northrop Frye statue unveiled for literary fans, CBC News Feb. 21, 2012
25. ^ Viola Pruss (March 5, 2017). "N.B. artists chosen to cast bronze statues of prime ministers". CBC News.
26. ^ Government of Canada Announces 12 New National Historic Designations, Parks Canada news release, March 27, 2018

## Sources[edit | edit source]

* Hart, Jonathan (1994). Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination. Critics of the Twentieth Century. London: Routledge (published 2005). ISBN 978-1-13490437-2. Retrieved 2018-03-14.

## External links[edit | edit source]

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Wikimedia Commons has media related to Northrop Frye.

Wikiquote has quotations related to Northrop Frye.

* The Northrop Frye Collection at the Victoria University Library at the University of Toronto A comprehensive collection of Northrop Frye's published work, literary manuscripts, correspondence, personal and professional writings, photographs and audiovisual materials.
* Herman Northrop Frye oral history interview sound recording held at the University of Toronto Archives and Records Management Services
* Northrop Frye @ 100: an exhibition celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of Northrop Frye's birth. Selected collection of childhood books and photographs to correspondence, addresses, published works, and awards.
* Works by or about Northrop Frye at Internet Archive
* An essay on Northrop Frye's life and ideas
* "Questioning Northrop Frye's Adaptation of Vico". An article in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Spring 2010, Vol. 37:3.
* The Frye Festival. An international literary festival in Moncton, New Brunswick.
* The Educated Imagination. A blog dedicated to Northrop Frye.
* The Bible and English Literature by Northrop Frye: Full Lectures. Between 1980 and 1981, Prof. Northrop Frye held 25 lectures under the title ‘The Bible and Literature’.

* v
* t
* e

Recipients of the Mondello Prize

Single Prize for Literature: Bartolo Cattafi (1975) • Achille Campanile (1976) • Günter Grass (1977)

Special Jury Prize: Denise McSmith (1975) • Stefano D'Arrigo (1977) • Jurij Trifonov (1978) • Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (1979) • Pietro Consagra (1980) • Ignazio Buttitta, Angelo Maria e Ela Ripellino (1983) • Leonardo Sciascia (1985) • Wang Meng (1987) • Mikhail Gorbaciov (1988) • Peter Carey, José Donoso, Northrop Frye, Jorge Semprún, Wole Soyinka, Lu Tongliu (1990) • Fernanda Pivano (1992) • Associazione Scrittori Cinesi (1993) • Dong Baoucum, Fan Boaci, Wang Huanbao, Shi Peide, Chen Yuanbin (1995) • Xu Huainzhong, Xiao Xue, Yu Yougqnan, Qin Weinjung (1996) • Khushwant Singh (1997) • Javier Marías (1998) • Francesco Burdin (2001) • Luciano Erba (2002) • Isabella Quarantotti De Filippo (2003) • Marina Rullo (2006) • Andrea Ceccherini (2007) • Enrique Vila-Matas (2009) • Francesco Forgione (2010)

First narrative work: Carmelo Samonà (1978) • Fausta Garavini (1979)

First poetic work: Giovanni Giuga (1978) • Gilberto Sacerdoti (1979)

Prize for foreign literature: Milan Kundera (1978) • N. Scott Momaday (1979) • Juan Carlos Onetti (1980) • Tadeusz Konwicki (1981)

Prize for foreign poetry: Jannis Ritsos (1978) • Joseph Brodsky (1979) • Juan Gelman (1980) • Gyula Illyés (1981)

First work: Valerio Magrelli (1980) • Ferruccio Benzoni, Stefano Simoncelli, Walter Valeri, Laura Mancinelli (1981) • Jolanda Insana (1982) • Daniele Del Giudice (1983) • Aldo Busi (1984) • Elisabetta Rasy, Dario Villa (1985) • Marco Lodoli, Angelo Mainardi (1986) • Marco Ceriani, Giovanni Giudice (1987) • Edoardo Albinati, Silvana La Spina (1988) • Andrea Canobbio, Romana Petri (1990) • Anna Cascella (1991) • Marco Caporali, Nelida Milani (1992) • Silvana Grasso, Giulio Mozzi (1993) • Ernesto Franco (1994) • Roberto Deidier (1995) • Giuseppe Quatriglio, Tiziano Scarpa (1996) • Fabrizio Rondolino (1997) • Alba Donati (1998) • Paolo Febbraro (1999) • Evelina Santangelo (2000) • Giuseppe Lupo (2001) • Giovanni Bergamini, Simona Corso (2003) • Adriano Lo Monaco (2004) • Piercarlo Rizzi (2005) • Francesco Fontana (2006) • Paolo Fallai (2007) • Luca Giachi (2008) • Carlo Carabba (2009) • Gabriele Pedullà (2010)

Foreign author: Alain Robbe-Grillet (1982) • Thomas Bernhard (1983) • Adolfo Bioy Casares (1984) • Bernard Malamud (1985) • Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1986) • Doris Lessing (1987) • V. S. Naipaul (1988) • Octavio Paz (1989) • Christa Wolf (1990) • Kurt Vonnegut (1991) • Bohumil Hrabal (1992) • Seamus Heaney (1993) • J. M. Coetzee (1994) • Vladimir Vojnovič (1995) • David Grossman (1996) • Philippe Jaccottet (1998) • Don DeLillo (1999) • Aleksandar Tišma (2000) • Nuruddin Farah (2001) • Per Olov Enquist (2002) • Adunis (2003) • Les Murray (2004) • Magda Szabó (2005) • Uwe Timm (2006) • Bapsi Sidhwa (2007) • Viktor Yerofeyev (2009) • Edmund White (2010) • Javier Cercas (2011) • Elizabeth Strout (2012) • Péter Esterházy (2013) • Joe R. Lansdale (2014) • Emmanuel Carrère (2015) • Marilynne Robinson (2016) • Cees Nooteboom (2017)

Italian Author: Alberto Moravia (1982) • Vittorio Sereni alla memoria (1983) • Italo Calvino (1984) • Mario Luzi (1985) • Paolo Volponi (1986) • Luigi Malerba (1987) • Oreste del Buono (1988) • Giovanni Macchia (1989) • Gianni Celati, Emilio Villa (1990) • Andrea Zanzotto (1991) • Ottiero Ottieri (1992) • Attilio Bertolucci (1993) • Luigi Meneghello (1994) • Fernando Bandini, Michele Perriera (1995) • Nico Orengo (1996) • Giuseppe Bonaviri, Giovanni Raboni (1997) • Carlo Ginzburg (1998) • Alessandro Parronchi (1999) • Elio Bartolini (2000) • Roberto Alajmo (2001) • Andrea Camilleri (2002) • Andrea Carraro, Antonio Franchini, Giorgio Pressburger (2003) • Maurizio Bettini, Giorgio Montefoschi, Nelo Risi (2004) • pr. Raffaele Nigro, sec. Maurizio Cucchi, ter. Giuseppe Conte (2005) • pr. Paolo Di Stefano, sec. Giulio Angioni (2006) • pr. Mario Fortunato, sec. Toni Maraini, ter. Andrea Di Consoli (2007) • pr. Andrea Bajani, sec. Antonio Scurati, ter. Flavio Soriga (2008) • pr. Mario Desiati, sec. Osvaldo Guerrieri, ter. Gregorio Scalise (2009) • pr. Lorenzo Pavolini, sec. Roberto Cazzola, ter. (2010) • pr. Eugenio Baroncelli, sec. Milo De Angelis, ter. Igiaba Scego (2011) • pr. Edoardo Albinati, sec. Paolo Di Paolo, ter. Davide Orecchio (2012) • pr. Andrea Canobbio, sec. Valerio Magrelli, ter. Walter Siti (2013) • pr. Irene Chias, sec. Giorgio Falco, ter. Francesco Pecoraro (2014) • pr. Nicola Lagioia, sec. Letizia Muratori, ter. Marco Missiroli (2015) • pr. Marcello Fois, sec. Emanuele Tonon, ter. Romana Petri (2016) • pr. Stefano Massini, sec. Alessandro Zaccuri, ter. Alessandra Sarchi (2017)

"Five Continents" Award: Kōbō Abe, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Germaine Greer, Wilson Harris, José Saramago (1992) • Kenzaburō Ōe (1993) • Stephen Spender (1994) • Thomas Keneally, Alberto Arbasino (1996) • Margaret Atwood, André Brink, David Malouf, Romesh Gunesekera, Christoph Ransmayr (1997)

"Palermo bridge for Europe" Award: Dacia Maraini (1999), Premio Palermo ponte per il Mediterraneo Alberto Arbasino (2000)

"Ignazio Buttitta" Award: Nino De Vita (2003) • Attilio Lolini (2005) • Roberto Rossi Precerotti (2006) • Silvia Bre (2007)

Supermondello Tiziano Scarpa (2009) • Michela Murgia (2010) • Eugenio Baroncelli (2011) • Davide Orecchio (2012) • Valerio Magrelli (2013) • Giorgio Falco (2014) • Marco Missiroli (2015) • Romana Petri (2016) • Stefano Massini (2017)

Special award of the President: Ibrahim al-Koni (2009) • Emmanuele Maria Emanuele (2010) • Antonio Calabrò (2011)

Poetry prize: Antonio Riccardi (2010)

Translation Award: Evgenij Solonovic (2010)

Identity and dialectal literatures award: Gialuigi Beccaria e Marco Paolini (2010)

Essays Prize: Marzio Barbagli (2010)

Mondello for Multiculturality Award: Kim Thúy (2011)

Mondello Youths Award: Claudia Durastanti (2011) • Edoardo Albinati (2012) • Alessandro Zaccuri  (2017)

"Targa Archimede", Premio all'Intelligenza d'Impresa: Enzo Sellerio (2011)

Prize for Literary Criticism: Salvatore Silvano Nigro (2012) • Maurizio Bettini (2013) • Enrico Testa (2014) • Ermanno Cavazzoni (2015) • Serena Vitale (2016) • Antonio Prete (2017)

Award for best motivation: Simona Gioè (2012)

Special award for travel literature: Marina Valensise (2013)

Special Award 40 Years of Mondello: Gipi (2014)

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Literary criticism

Literary theory|

* Archetypal criticism
* Biographical criticism
* Chicago school
* Cultural materialism
* Darwinian criticism
* Deconstruction
* Descriptive poetics
* Ecocriticism
* Feminist criticism
* Formalism
* Geocriticism
* Marxist criticism
* New Criticism
* New historicism
* Postcolonial criticism
* Postcritique
* Psychoanalytic criticism
* Reader-response criticism
* Russian formalism
* Semiotic criticism
* Sociological criticism
* Source criticism
* Thing theory

File:Antique-books-woodward.jpg

Theorists and critics|

* Plato
* Aristotle
* Horace
* Longinus
* Plotinus
* St. Augustine
* Boethius
* Aquinas
* Dante
* Boccaccio
* Christine de Pizan
* Bharata Muni
* Rajashekhara
* Valmiki
* Anandavardhana
* Cao Pi
* Lu Ji
* Liu Xie
* Wang Changling
* Lodovico Castelvetro
* Philip Sidney
* Jacopo Mazzoni
* Torquato Tasso
* Francis Bacon
* Henry Reynolds
* Thomas Hobbes
* Pierre Corneille
* John Dryden
* Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
* John Locke
* John Dennis
* Alexander Pope
* Joseph Addison
* Giambattista Vico
* Edmund Burke
* David Hume
* Samuel Johnson
* Edward Young
* Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
* Joshua Reynolds
* Denis Diderot
* Immanuel Kant
* Mary Wollstonecraft
* William Blake
* Friedrich Schiller
* Friedrich Schlegel
* William Wordsworth
* Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
* Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
* Samuel Taylor Coleridge
* Wilhelm von Humboldt
* John Keats
* Arthur Schopenhauer
* Thomas Love Peacock
* Percy Bysshe Shelley
* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
* Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
* Giacomo Leopardi
* Francesco De Sanctis
* Thomas Carlyle
* John Stuart Mill
* Ralph Waldo Emerson
* Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
* James Russell Lowell
* Edgar Allan Poe
* Matthew Arnold
* Hippolyte Taine
* Charles Baudelaire
* Karl Marx
* Søren Kierkegaard
* Friedrich Nietzsche
* Walter Pater
* Émile Zola
* Anatole France
* Oscar Wilde
* Stéphane Mallarmé
* Leo Tolstoy
* Benedetto Croce
* Antonio Gramsci
* Umberto Eco
* A. C. Bradley
* Sigmund Freud
* Ferdinand de Saussure
* Claude Lévi-Strauss
* T. E. Hulme
* Walter Benjamin
* Viktor Shklovsky
* T. S. Eliot
* Irving Babbitt
* Carl Jung
* Leon Trotsky
* Boris Eikhenbaum
* Virginia Woolf
* I. A. Richards
* Mikhail Bakhtin
* Georges Bataille
* John Crowe Ransom
* R. P. Blackmur
* Jacques Lacan
* György Lukács
* Paul Valéry
* Kenneth Burke
* Ernst Cassirer
* W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley
* Cleanth Brooks
* Jan Mukařovský
* Jean-Paul Sartre
* Simone de Beauvoir
* Ronald Crane
* Philip Wheelwright
* Theodor Adorno
* Roman Jakobson
* Northrop Frye
* Gaston Bachelard
* Ernst Gombrich
* Martin Heidegger
* E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
* Noam Chomsky
* Jacques Derrida
* Roland Barthes
* Michel Foucault
* Hans Robert Jauss
* Georges Poulet
* Raymond Williams
* Lionel Trilling
* Julia Kristeva
* Paul de Man
* Harold Bloom
* Chinua Achebe
* Stanley Fish
* Edward Said
* Elaine Showalter
* Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
* Murray Krieger
* Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
* René Girard
* Hélène Cixous
* Jonathan Culler
* Geoffrey Hartman
* Wolfgang Iser
* Hayden White
* Hans-Georg Gadamer
* Paul Ricoeur
* Peter Szondi
* M. H. Abrams
* J. Hillis Miller
* Clifford Geertz
* Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
* Tristan Tzara
* André Breton
* Mina Loy
* Yokomitsu Riichi
* Oswald de Andrade
* Hu Shih
* Octavio Paz

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