Herman Northrop Frye, (July 14, 1912 – January 23, 1991) was a Canadian

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

  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

Fearful Symmetry (Frye)

Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake is a 1947 book by Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye whose subject is the work of English poet and visual artist William Blake. The book has been hailed as one of the most important contributions to the study of William Blake and one of the very first...

(1947), which led to the reinterpretation of the poetry of William Blake

William Blake

William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...

. His lasting reputation rests principally on the theory of literary criticism that he developed in Anatomy of Criticism

Anatomy of Criticism

Herman Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays attempts to formulate an overall view of the scope, theory, principles, and techniques of literary criticism derived exclusively from literature...

(1957), one of the most important works of literary theory published in the twentieth century. American critic Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...

 commented at the time of its publication that Anatomy established Frye as "the foremost living student of Western literature." Frye's contributions to cultural and social criticism spanned a long career during which he earned widespread recognition and received many honours.

Early life and education

Frye was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec

Quebec

Quebec or is a province in east-central Canada. It is the only Canadian province with a predominantly French-speaking population and the only one whose sole official language is French at the provincial level....

 but raised in Moncton, New Brunswick

New Brunswick

New Brunswick is one of Canada's three Maritime provinces and is the only province in the federation that is constitutionally bilingual . The provincial capital is Fredericton and Saint John is the most populous city. Greater Moncton is the largest Census Metropolitan Area...

. He was the son of Herman Edward Frye and Catherine Maud Howard. Frye went to Toronto to compete in a national typing contest in 1929. He studied for his undergraduate degree at Victoria College in the University of Toronto

Victoria University in the University of Toronto

Victoria University is a constituent college of the University of Toronto, founded in 1836 and named for Queen Victoria. It is commonly called Victoria College, informally Vic, after the original academic component that now forms its undergraduate division...

. He then studied theology at Emmanuel College (which, like Victoria College, is a constituent part of the University of Toronto). After a brief stint as a student minister in Saskatchewan

Saskatchewan

Saskatchewan is a prairie province in Canada, which has an area of . Saskatchewan is bordered on the west by Alberta, on the north by the Northwest Territories, on the east by Manitoba, and on the south by the U.S. states of Montana and North Dakota....

, he was ordained to the ministry of the United Church of Canada

United Church of Canada

The United Church of Canada is a Protestant Christian denomination in Canada. It is the largest Protestant church and, after the Roman Catholic Church, the second-largest Christian church in Canada...

. He then studied at Merton College, Oxford

Merton College, Oxford

Merton College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. Its foundation can be traced back to the 1260s when Walter de Merton, chancellor to Henry III and later to Edward I, first drew up statutes for an independent academic community and established endowments to...

, before returning to Victoria College, where he spent the remainder of his professional career.

Academic and writing career

Frye rose to international prominence as a result of his first book, Fearful Symmetry

Fearful Symmetry (Frye)

Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake is a 1947 book by Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye whose subject is the work of English poet and visual artist William Blake. The book has been hailed as one of the most important contributions to the study of William Blake and one of the very first...

, published in 1947. Until then, the prophetic poetry of William Blake

William Blake

William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...

 had long been poorly understood, considered by some to be delusional ramblings. Frye found in it a system of metaphor derived from Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books, with a total of over ten thousand individual lines of verse...

and the Bible

Bible

The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

. His study of Blake's poetry was a major contribution. 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, among others, Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...

 and Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Eleanor Atwood, is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history; she is a winner of the Arthur C...

.

In 1974–1975 Frye was the Norton professor at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

.

Canada's intelligence service of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police

Royal Canadian Mounted Police

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police , literally ‘Royal Gendarmerie of Canada’; colloquially known as The Mounties, and internally as ‘The Force’) is the national police force of Canada, and one of the most recognized of its kind in the world. It is unique in the world as a national, federal,...

 spied on Frye, watching his participation in the anti-Vietnam War movement, an academic forum about China, and activism to end South African apartheid.http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/story/2011/07/24/frye-rcmp-spying.html

Family life

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. He died in 1991 and was interred in Mount Pleasant Cemetery

Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Toronto

Mount Pleasant Cemetery is a cemetery located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.In the early 19th century, the only authorized cemeteries within the city of Toronto were limited to the members of either the Roman Catholic Church or the Church of England...

 in Toronto

Toronto

Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...

, Ontario

Ontario

Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....

.

Contribution to literary criticism

The insights gained from his study of Blake

William Blake

William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...

 set Frye on his critical path and shaped his contributions to literary criticism

Literary criticism

Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...

 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

Anatomy of Criticism

Herman Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays attempts to formulate an overall view of the scope, theory, principles, and techniques of literary criticism derived exclusively from literature...

(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

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

John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill was a British philosopher, economist and civil servant. An influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy, his conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of...

 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).

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

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).
Taking his cue from Aristotle

Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...

, 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

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

Mythology

The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...

 and metaphors" which he calls "archetype

Archetype

An archetype is a universally understood symbol or term or pattern of behavior, a prototype upon which others are copied, patterned, or emulated...

s" (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' (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

Culture

Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...

(Hamilton 27).

A theory of the imagination

Once asked whether his critical theory were Romantic

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

, 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

Ritual

A ritual is a set of actions, performed mainly for their symbolic value. It may be prescribed by a religion or by the traditions of a community. The term usually excludes actions which are arbitrarily chosen by the performers....

, myth

Mythology

The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...

, 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

Mythology

The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...

: ". . . 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 0 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). 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

Giambattista Vico

Giovanni Battista ' Vico or Vigo was an Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist....

.

Frye's critical method

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

Ode on a Grecian Urn

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a poem written by the English Romantic poet John Keats in May 1819 and published in January 1820 . It is one of his "Great Odes of 1819", which include "Ode on Indolence", "Ode on Melancholy", "Ode to a Nightingale", and "Ode to Psyche"...

", is dominantly centripetal, stressing the sound and movement and imagery of the ordered words. Rhetorical novels, like Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War", according to Will Kaufman....

, 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

New Criticism

New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic...

 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"

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 4). 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

Longinus (literature)

Longinus is the conventional name of the author of the treatise, On the Sublime , a work which focuses on the effect of good writing. Longinus, sometimes referred to as Pseudo-Longinus because his real name is unknown, was a Greek teacher of rhetoric or a literary critic who may have lived in the...

 — 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

Liberal education

A Liberal education is a system or course of education suitable for the cultivation of a free human being. It is based on the medieval concept of the liberal arts or, more commonly now, the liberalism of the Age of Enlightenment...

, 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

Vico, in The New Science, posited a view of language as fundamentally figurative, and introduced into Enlightenment

Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...

 discourse the notion of the role of the imagination in creating meaning. For Vico, poetic discourse is prior to philosophical discourse; philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 is in fact derivative of poetry

Poetry

Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...

. 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

William Blake

William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...

, Frye's "Virgilian guide" (Stingle 1), who first awakened Frye to the "mythological frame of our culture" (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

Bible

The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

 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

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. 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. 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. 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.

Frye collected his disparate writings on Canadian writing and painting in The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination

The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination

The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination is a collection of essays by Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye . The collection was originally published in 1971; it was republished, with an introduction by Canadian postmodern theorist Linda Hutcheon, in 1995. The Bush Garden features...

 (1971). He also aided James Polk in compiling Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture (1982). In the posthumous Collected Works of Northrop Frye, his writings on Canada occupy the thick 12th volume.

Based on his observations of Canadian literature, Frye concluded that, by extension, Canadian identity

Canadian identity

Canadian identity refers to the set of characteristics and symbols that many Canadians regard as expressing their unique place and role in the world....

 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.

Works by Northrop Frye

The following is a list of his books, including the volumes in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye

Collected Works of Northrop Frye

The project of producing a scholarly, uniform edition of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye grew from modest beginnings in 1993; the project has been funded by grants from the Michael G. DeGroote family through McMaster University, from the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of...

, an ongoing project under the editorship of Alvin A. Lee

Alvin A. Lee

Alvin A. Lee , B.A., M.A., M.Div., Ph.D., is a literary critic. The majority of his academic career—some 39 years—was spent at McMaster University in Hamilton; he served as President and vice-chancellor of that university from 1980 to 1990...

.

• Fearful Symmetry
  Fearful Symmetry (Frye)
  Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake is a 1947 book by Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye whose subject is the work of English poet and visual artist William Blake. The book has been hailed as one of the most important contributions to the study of William Blake and one of the very first...
  
  
• Anatomy of Criticism
  Anatomy of Criticism
  Herman Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays attempts to formulate an overall view of the scope, theory, principles, and techniques of literary criticism derived exclusively from literature...
  
  
• The Educated Imagination
• Fables of Identity
• T.S. Eliot
• The Well-Tempered Critic
  The Well-Tempered Critic (Frye)
  The Well-Tempered Critic is a collection of essays by a Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye. The collection was originally published in Bloomington, Indiana by the Indiana University Press in 1963....
  
  
• 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 Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination
  The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination is a collection of essays by Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye . The collection was originally published in 1971; it was republished, with an introduction by Canadian postmodern theorist Linda Hutcheon, in 1995. The Bush Garden features...
  
  
• 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
  Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture
  Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture is a collection of essays by Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye, edited by James Polk and published in 1982. The collection includes lectures, addresses and previously published articles by Frye...
  
  
• The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare's Problem Comedies
• Harper Handbook to Literature (with Sheridan Baker and George W. Perkins
  George W. Perkins
  George Walbridge Perkins, Sr. was vice-president of New York Life Insurance Company and a partner in J.P. Morgan & Co...
  
  )
• 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 in Conversation (an interview with David Cayley
  David Cayley
  David Cayley, is a Toronto-based Canadian writer and broadcaster, who was a friend of Ivan Illich. His work airs on CBC Radio One's program Ideas.-List of works:* Ideas on the Nature of Science ISBN 9780864925442...
  
  )
• The Eternal Act of Creation
• Collected Works of Northrop Frye
  Collected Works of Northrop Frye
  The project of producing a scholarly, uniform edition of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye grew from modest beginnings in 1993; the project has been funded by grants from the Michael G. DeGroote family through McMaster University, from the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of...
  
  
• Northrop Frye on Religion

Other accomplishments

• edited fifteen books
• composed essays and chapters that appear in over sixty books
• 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

Awards and honors

Frye was elected to the Royal Society of Canada

Royal Society of Canada

The Royal Society of Canada , may also operate under the more descriptive name RSC: The Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada , is the oldest association of scientists and scholars in Canada...

 in 1951 and awarded the Royal Society's Lorne Pierce Medal

Lorne Pierce Medal

The Lorne Pierce Medal is awarded every two years by the Royal Society of Canada to recognize achievement of special significance and conspicuous merit in imaginative or critical literature written in either English or French...

 (1958) and its Pierre Chauveau Medal

Pierre Chauveau Medal

The Pierre Chauveau Medal is an award of the Royal Society of Canada "for a distinguished contribution to knowledge in the humanities other than Canadian literature and Canadian history". It is named in honour of Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau and is awarded bi-annually. The award consists of a...

 (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. He was an Honorary Fellow or Member of the following:

• American Academy of Arts and Sciences
  American Academy of Arts and Sciences
  The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
  
   (1969)
• Merton College, Oxford
  Merton College, Oxford
  Merton College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. Its foundation can be traced back to the 1260s when Walter de Merton, chancellor to Henry III and later to Edward I, first drew up statutes for an independent academic community and established endowments to...
  
   (1974)
• British Academy
  British Academy
  The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national body for the humanities and the social sciences. Its purpose is to inspire, recognise and support excellence in the humanities and social sciences, throughout the UK and internationally, and to champion their role and value.It receives an annual...
  
   (1975)
• American Philosophical Society
  American Philosophical Society
  The American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743, and located in Philadelphia, Pa., is an eminent scholarly organization of international reputation, that promotes useful knowledge in the sciences and humanities through excellence in scholarly research, professional meetings, publications,...
  
   (1976), and
• American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1981).

Northrop Frye was made a Companion of the Order of Canada

Order of Canada

The Order of Canada is a Canadian national order, admission into which is, within the system of orders, decorations, and medals of Canada, the second highest honour for merit...

 in 1972. In 2000, he was honoured by the government of Canada with his image on a postage stamp. An international literary festival The Frye Festival

The Frye Festival

The Frye Festival, formerly known as the Northrop Frye International Literary Festival, is a bilingual literary festival held in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada in April of each year...

, 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, 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.

External links

• 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.
• 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.