Northrop Frye's Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

With the exception of his writings on Blake, already published in two
earlier volumes of the Collected Works, this book gathers together all
Northrop Frye’s publications on literature from 1700 to 1900,
including a now-annotated text of his full-length Romanticism
Reconsidered. The book is divided into three parts: “On the Eighteenth
Century,” “On Romanticism,” and “On the Nineteenth Century”;
individual items are arranged, in chronological order of writing, within
each section. This makes perfect editorial sense, but can lead to some
surprising juxtapositions—one can turn a page from a learned 1986
review of a book by Paul de Man and encounter an undergraduate review of
a Gilbert and Sullivan opera written for a college magazine 54 years
earlier.

Inevitably an intellectual potpourri, the book contains introductions
to anthologies, addresses to learned conferences, lectures to more
general audiences, etc. As usual, the writing, though erudite, is
invariably lucid, and often witty. One marvels at the ease with which he
is able to explain complex matters in a readily accessible way. The
range is extraordinarily wide, and includes subjects that one does not
normally associate with Frye. Because his ideas on the main literary
canon are so well known, these last come across as more fresh and
original. The last two items, for example, focus on Wagner’s Parsifal
and the 19th-century Samuel Butler.

I have to report, however, that the editing is not up to the meticulous
standard of its predecessors. The last item began as an F.E.L. Priestley
Memorial Lecture. Priestley was a distinguished colleague of Frye’s at
the University of Toronto, and is duly acknowledged in the opening
paragraph. But the editor misspells his name both in the editorial note
and in the index. In addition, the lecture is on Butler’s Life and
Habit, and I wanted to check the edition used; but I had to go through
complicated contortions to track down the full details in a previous
note appearing 13 pages earlier. This is the reverse of
“user-friendly.” Still, the content itself is solid and important.