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Scholarly Editions: 
The Collected Works of Northrop Frye
(U Toronto Press)

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Collected Works of Northrop Frye

The Collected Edition of the Works of Northrop Frye has been planned and is being directed by an editorial committee under the aegis of Victoria University, through its Northrop Frye Centre. The purpose of the edition is to make available authoritative texts of both published and unpublished works, based on analysis and comparison of all available materials, and supported by scholarly apparatus, including annotation and introductions. The Northrop Frye Centre gratefully acknowledges financial support, through McMaster University, from the Michael G. DeGroote family.

General Editor: Alvin A. Lee, McMaster University.

1 & 2. Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp. Edited by Robert Denham (1996). Two volumes.
3. Nortrhop Frye's Student Essays. Edited by Robert Denham (1997).
4. Northrop Frye on Religion. Edited by Alvin A. Lee and Jean O'Grady (2000)
5 & 6. Northrop Frye's Late Notebooks, 1982-1990. Edited by Robert D. Denham (2000). Two volumes.
7. Northrop Frye's Writings on Education. Edited by Jean O'Grady and Goldwin French (2000).
8. The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942-1955. Edited by Robert D. Denham. (Forthcomgin Summer 2001)

Northrop Frye on Religion
Alvin A. Lee and Jean O'Grady
Collected Works of Northrop Frye, Vol. 4
University of Toronto Press 2000
632 pages / 6x9
Date of Publication: 16/03/00. World Rights
CLOTH  0802009573  $75.00  £55.00  Status: ACT
PAPER   0802079202  $29.95  £18.00  Status: ACT

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 Words with Power will be published in separate volumes of the collected edition.) The writings presented here span a period of fifty-seven years and range from prayers to convocation addresses. Although remarkably diverse in form and content, they reveal the splendid coherence of Frye's vision.

This is a quintessential volume in the Collected Works, indispensable to all whohave been inspired by Frye's work. In it we find the brilliant and often unorthodox record of a great mind imaginatively open to the transforming power of the Bible, and open also to what William Blake called "the human form divine."

ALVIN A. LEE is Professor of English and President Emeritus, McMaster University. He is General Editor of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye.

JEAN O'GRADY is Associate Editor of the Collected Works of Northrop


Northrop Frye's Late Notebooks,1982-1990
Edited by Robert Denham
Collected Works of Northrop Frye,  Vol. 5
University of Toronto Press 2000
472 pages / 6.125x9.25
Date of Publication: 01/08/00. World Rights
CLOTH  0802047513  $75.00  £45.00  Status: NYP

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 territory, never failing to surprise, delight, and provoke. In these notebooks, for instance, we find comments triggered by a detective story Frye is reading, a lecture he has to prepare, a glance at the books on his shelves, a quotation he remembers, a letter received, or the memory of a trip. In many respects, the notebooks reveal a Frye who is quite different from the critic who made his reputation with "Fearful Symmetry" and "Anatomy of Criticism", displaying aspects of his personality and thought that are not apparent in his books and essays. The notebooks show us the unbuttoned Frye, a complex man capable of both spiritual transcendence and hard-headed pragmatism. Here, for instance, his criticism of Catholicism is far more acerbic than in anything he published. Likewise, his rejection of both Marxist and feminist ideology is far more pointed than elsewhere.

These two volumes include seven of Frye's handwritten notebooks and five collections of his typed notebooks – all previously unpublished. The material is the record of an extraordinary intellectual odyssey, an odyssey that is, at its base, deeply spiritual.

Robert D. Denham is John P. Fishwick Professor of English at Roanoke College

'Frye concentrated on structures of imagery, regarding poetry as a recreation of the world in the
image of the poet's fears and desires. In these notes and notebooks, one sees only a little of the
outward, natural man, worrying about work and death, but a great deal of the inward, spiritual
man, captaining the drunken boat of contemporary criticism as he charts the perilous seas of
fairylands.' Thomas Willard, Department of English, University of Arizona


Northrop Frye's Late Notebooks,1982-1990
Edited by Robert Denham
Collected Works of Northrop Frye, Vol. 6
University of Toronto Press 2000
472 pages / 6.08x9.04
Date of Publication: 01/08/00. World Rights
CLOTH  0802047521  $75.00  £45.00  Status: NYP

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 territory, never failing to surprise, delight, and provoke. In these notebooks, for instance, we find comments triggered by a detective story Frye is reading, a lecture he has to prepare, a glance at the books on his shelves, a quotation he remembers, a letter received, or the memory of a trip. In many respects, the notebooks reveal a Frye who is quite different from the critic who made his reputation with "Fearful Symmetry" and "Anatomy of Criticism", displaying aspects of his personality and thought that are not apparent in his books and essays. The notebooks show us the unbuttoned Frye, a complex man capable of both spiritual transcendence and hard-headed pragmatism. Here, for instance, his criticism of Catholicism is far more acerbic than in anything he published. Likewise, hisrejection of both Marxist and feminist ideology is far more pointed than elsewhere.

These two volumes include seven of Frye's handwritten notebooks and five collections of his typed notebooks – all previously unpublished. The material is the record of an extraordinary intellectual odyssey, an odyssey that is, at its base, deeply spiritual.

Robert D. Denham is John P. Fishwick Professor of English at Roanoke College

'Frye concentrated on structures of imagery, regarding poetry as a recreation of the world in the image of the poet's fears and desires. In these notes and notebooks, one sees only a little of the outward, natural man, worrying about work and death, but a great deal of the inward, spiritual man, captaining the drunken boat of contemporary criticism as he charts the perilous seas of fairylands.'Thomas Willard, Department of English, University of Arizona



Northrop Frye's Writings on Education
Edited by Jean O'Grady and Goldwin French
Collected Works of Northrop Frye, Vol. 7
University of Toronto Press 2001
752 pages / 6x9
Date of Publication: 01/02/00. World Rights
CLOTH  0802048277  $100.0  £65.00  Status: ACT

This volume brings together 95 different pieces on education by Northrop Frye, dating from 1931 to 1989. It traces Frye’s thinking about education from his student days through the campus unrestof the 1960s and the more recent budgetary crises facing higher education in Canada. Frye’s consistent affirmation that the goal of a liberal education is to make one maladjusted may give somehint as to the richness and variety of the writings collected here.

Among the range of subjects that Frye addresses are teaching (from kindergarten to university), literary studies, the nature of the university, student radicalism, educational policy and procedure, and particular occasions in the life of Victoria University. The volume includes articles, speeches, reports, a short book, introductions, letters to the editor, and some obscure and newly discovered texts. As former students and colleagues of Frye, the editors have brought personal as well as scholarly knowledge to the volume. Each provides part of the introduction: the first placing the works in the context of Frye’s biography and the changes in university education over his lifetime; the other discussing them theoretically and in relation to his ideas about literature and the imagination.

Frye was influential not only as a theorist of education but as a teacher and administrator. His ritings on education are a central part of his life’s work, and no Frye scholar or enthusiast should be without them.

Jean O’Grady is Associate Editor, Collected Works of Northrop Frye, Victoria University.
Goldwin French is President Emeritus, Victoria University.


The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942-1955
Edited by Robert D. Denham
Collected Works of Northrop Frye, Vol. 8
University of Toronto Press 2001
736 pages / 6x9
Date of Publication: 01/07/01. World Rights
CLOTH  0802035388   $95.00   £65.00   Status: NYP
218

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

For Frye, diary-writing was a tool for recording "everything of importance" and this ruled out very little. His entries contain a large measure of self-analysis and self-revelation, and in this respect are confessional -- we see his sanguine humour, dark moods and claustrophobia, along with the more self-congratulatory aspects of his character. But the volume also serves as a chronicle. Peering over Frye's shoulder, we watch him teach his classes, plan hiscareer, record his dreams, register his frank reactions to the hundreds of peoplewho cross his path, eye attractive women, reflect on books, music and movies, ponder religious and political issues, consider his various physical and psychological ailments, practise the piano, visit bookstores, frequent Toronto restaurants, and record scores of additional activities, mundane and otherwise.

The volume is fully annotated and contains a directory that identifies the more than 1200 people who make an appearance. Published here for the first time, these chronicles provide an unprecedented view of the life and times of this now-legendary scholar.

ROBERT D. DENHAM is John P. Fishwick Professor of English, Roanoke College.

‘The Diaries are more vividly self-revealing than I could have anticipated. The running lament over wasted time, the self-reproach for clumsiness and evasiveness, the many minor illnesses (and only one cancelled lecture because of them) all came as a surprise to me, as did his keen observations, some kind, some unkind, on the people he encountered - great numbers of people. It was likewise a revelation to see so many of his ideas in the process of taking shape.’








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