Northrop Frye and Others: The Order of Words

by Robert D. Denham

Overview

This book, based on extensive archival and historical work, identifies and brings to light additional and littlerecognized intellectual influences on Frye, and analyzes how they informed his thought. These are variously major thinkers, sets of texts, and intellectual traditions: the Mahayana Sutras, Machiavelli, Rabelais, Boehme, Hegel, Coleridge, Carlyle, Mill, Jane Ellen Harrison and Elizabeth Fraser.
In each chapter, dedicated to Frye’s connection to a specific influence, Denham describes how Frye became acquainted with each, and how he interpreted and adapted certain ideas from them to help work out his own conceptual systems. Denham offers insights on Frye’s relationship with his historical and intellectual contexts, provides valuable additional context for understanding the work of one of the 20th century’s leading scholars of literature and culture.
Includes over 20 photos, tables and figures, as well as a chapter on Frye’s personal relationship with Elizabeth Fraser.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780776625454
Publisher:	University of Ottawa Press
Publication date:	08/16/2017
Series:	Canadian Literature Collection
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	270
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Robert D. Denham is John P. Fishwick Professor of English, Emeritus, at Roanoke College in Salem Virginia. He has devoted much of his professional life to writing about Northrop Frye and editing his work. He wrote and edited over twenty-five books on Frye, including eleven volumes of his Collected Works.

Read an Excerpt

The greatest sources for new discoveries and revisionary understanding are the notebooks, diaries, student essays, correspondence, and previously unpublished articles.

Table of Contents

Introduction 
Abbreviations and Short Titles  
1 Frye and the Mahayana Sutras  Frye and the East  The Sutras  The Lankavatara Sutra  The Avatamsaka Sutra  The Translation of Ideas  Holism and Interpenetration  The Avatamsaka Sutra Revisited  The Incarnation and Interpenetration
2 Frye and Niccolò Machiavelli  “Machiavellian” in English Renaissance Drama Virtù  Hypocrisy  Machiavelli, Shakespeare, and Hypocrisy Upward 
3 Frye and François Rabelais  Gargantua and Pantagruel as an Anatomy Rhythm  Giantism and Allegory  The Seattle Illumination and the Oracle of the Bottle  Creative Descent 
4 Frye and Jacob Boehme  Blake and Boehme  The Deification of the Void  Nothing: Boehme, Eckhart, and The Cloud of Unknowing  Schematic Thinking and the Kabbalah  Numbers and Synchronicity  Coincidentia Oppositorum 
5 Frye and G.W.F. Hegel Appropriating Hegel as a Student  Dialectic  The Hegelian Aufhebung  Aufhebung at Work  Ladder  Levels of Meaning 
6 Frye and Samuel Taylor Coleridge Logos and the One Big Book  The Imagination  Interpenetration  Aphorism 
7 Frye and Thomas Carlyle  The Diagrammatic Basis of Thought  Work  The Hero and Heroism  Symbolism 
8 Frye and John Stuart Mill  Liberty  Liberalism  Coda: The Opposition 
9 Frye and Jane Ellen Harrison  Frye’s Reading of the Cambridge Classicists  The Cambridge School and the Context of Archetypal Criticism  Dromena: Things Done  Eniautos Daimon  From Fluttering Female to Wise Woman 
10 Frye and Elizabeth Fraser: Her Letters to Him 
Works Cited
Notes
Index