In 1933, Northrop Frye was a recent university graduate, beginning to learn his craft as a literary essayist. By 1963, with the publication of The Educated Imagination, he had become an international academic celebrity. In the intervening three decades, Frye wrote widely and prodigiously, but it is in the papers and lectures collected in this installment of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye, that the genesis of a distinguished literary critic can be seen. Here is Frye tracing the first outlines of a literary cosmology that would culminate in The Anatomy of Criticism (1958) and shapeThe Great Code (1982) and Words with Power (1990).

At the same time that Frye garnered such international acclaim, he was also a working university teacher, lecturing in the University of Toronto's English Language and Literature program. In her lively introduction, Germaine Warkentin links Frye's evolution as a critic with his love of music, his passionate concern for his students, and his growing professional ambition. The writings included in this volume show how Frye integrated ideas into the work that would consolidate the fame that Fearful Symmetry (1947) had first established.

Preface

Credits and Sources

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Dr. Edgar’s Book
2. Art Does Need Sociability
3. Music in Poetry
4. The Anatomy in Prose Fiction
5. The Nature of Satire
6. Nichols and Kirkup’s The Cosmic Shape
7. R.F. Patterson’s The Story of English Literature
8. The Function of Criticism at the Present Time
9. The Four Forms of Prose Fiction
10. Levels of Meaning in Literature
11. A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres
12. The Archetypes of Literature
13. Three Meanings of Symbolism
14. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes
15. Towards a Theory of Cultural History
16. Art in a New Modulation
17. Ministry of Angels
18. Critics and Criticism
19. Myth as Information
20. Content with the Form
21. Forming Fours
22. The Language of Poetry
23. The Transferability of Literary Concepts
24. An Indispensable Book
25. “Preface” and “Introduction: Lexis and Melos”
26. The Ulysses Theme and Tragic Themes in Western Literature
27. Nature and Homer
28. Sir James Frazer
29. Interior Monologue of M. Teste
30. World Enough without Time
31. Literature as Possession
32. New Directions from Old
33. The Well-Tempered Critic (I)
34. The Well-Tempered Critic (II)
35. Myth, Fiction, and Displacement
36. The Imaginative and the Imaginary
37. The Educated Imagination

Notes

Emendations

Index