Northrop Frye: Eastern and Western Perspectives

Mima Vulovic is a sessional lecturer at York University who also works
at the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General.

Northrop Frye, an icon of Canadian literary theory, has been slowly
losing ground to his socially and historically oriented counterparts in
the last two decades. A counterbalance to this trend has been Frye’s
growing prominence in China.

Based on proceedings from an international symposium on Frye that was
held in Hoh-Hot, Inner Mongolia, in 1999, the essays in this volume are
divided into three sections: Frye as Theorist, which sets the stage for
theoretical and methodological approaches within the cross-cultural
context; Frye and Canada, which applies Frye’s theory to Canadian
letters and includes James Steele’s much-praised essay on Atwood’s
Cat’s Eye; and Frye and China, in which Chinese scholars use Frye’s
theories to explore their own literature. Drawing on some previously
unpublished notebooks, the volume also demonstrates the extent of
Frye’s familiarity with Asian religion and literature and offers a
valuable bibliography of recent Chinese works on Frye and archetypal
theory.

The essays, which are generally of a high standard, are contributed by
Michael Dolzani, Robert R. Denham, Graham Nicol Forst, Glen Robert Gill,
Jan Gorak, Sandra Djwa, James Steele, Thomas Willard, Wu Chizhe, Ye
Shuxian, and Gu Mindong, as well as co-editors Jean O’Grady and Wang
Ning. O’Grady, a former student of Northrop Frye, is associate editor
of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye and co-editor of Northrop Frye
on Religion and Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education. Ning, a
professor of English and director of the Centre for Comparative
Literature and Cultural Studies at Tsinghua University, is the author of
Comparative Studies of 20th Century Western Literature.