Northrop Frye S Notebooks On Romance

Romance was a theme that ran through much of Northrop Frye's corpus, and his notebooks and typed notes on the subject are plentiful. This unpublished material, written between 1944 and 1989, traces a remarkable re-evaluation in his thinking over the course of time. As a young scholar, Frye insisted that romance was an expression of cultural decadence; however, in his later years, he thought of it as "the structural core of all fiction." The unpublished material Michael Dolzani has gathered for Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Romance shows how the pattern and conventions of romance inform the writing of history, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and theology. While Frye is best known for his writing on myth and biblical scholarship, he himself eventually conceived of romance as the true and equal contrary to myth and scripture, a "secular scripture" whose message is de te fabula, "this story is about you." Given the current popular revival of romance in fiction and film, the appearance of Frye's unpublished work on romance is of profound importance.

'What good is the study of literature? Does it help us think more clearly, or feel more sensitively, or live a better life than we could without it?'' Written in the relaxed and frequently humorous style of his public lectures, this remains, of Northrop Frye's many books, perhaps the easiest introduction to his theories of literature and literary education.

This collection of 266 letters, cards, and telegrams that Helen Kemp and Northrop Frye wrote to each other forms a compelling narrative of their early relationship. The letters reveal Frye's early talent as a writer.

Reassesses the tradition and individual works of Western romance, from ancient Greece to the present, as constituting an imaginative universe in which man, moving between the idyllic and demonic, functions as a scriptural hero.

Although Northrop Frye's first book, Fearful Symmetry (1947), elevated the reputation of William Blake from the status of a minor eccentric to that of a major Romantic poet, Frye in fact saw Blake as a poet (and, consequently, himself as a critic) not of the Romantic period, but of the Renaissance. As such, Frye's meditations on the Renaissance are particularly valuable. This volume collects six of Frye's notebooks and five sets of his typed notes on subjects related to Renaissance literature. Michael Dolzani divides these notes into three categories: those on Spenser and the epic tradition; those on Shakespearean drama and, more widely, the dramatic tradition from Old Comedy to the masque; and those on lyric poetry and non-fiction prose. The organization of this volume reflects 'a comprehensive study of Renaissance Symbolism' in three volumes, which Frye proposed to the Guggenheim Foundation in 1949. Frye received a Guggenheim fellowship, but never wrote the book; nevertheless, his application, part of which is also included here, is an important document. The Guggenheim application not only reveals the outlines of Frye's thinking about literature, it also uncovers his plans for his future creative life during the crucial period between his completion of Fearful Symmetry and his absorption in the writing of Anatomy of Criticism. In addition to providing insight into Frye's thinking process, the material collected into this key volume in the Collected Works is of particular importance because much of it has no direct counterpart in any of Frye's other published works.

Angela Esterhammer, a student of Frye's in the 1980s, has provided annotation and an introduction that demonstrates the poets' importance for Frye's literary and cultural criticism and provides a twenty-first-century perspective on the legacy of his work.