Northrop Frye on Canada

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.

The great merit of this book is that it gathers together virtually all
Frye’s writings about Canada within two covers. (The few exceptions,
listed in the preface, interconnect with other aspects of his work, and
will appear in other volumes.) Much of the contents will be familiar to
specialist readers of Frye himself or of Canadian literature, since the
whole contents of The Bush Garden and much of Divisions on a Ground and
Reading the World are included. But there is much else as well,
including several contributions to the Canadian Forum between 1938 and
1954, and various hitherto-uncollected introductions, articles, and
scholarly addresses, plus a handful of items that have never appeared in
print before.

Two important points need to be stressed. First, the contents are by no
means confined to literature. A surprising number of items focus on art,
and others include thoughtful and often incisive comments on historical,
political, social, and general cultural issues. Second, even the
familiar material appears here in new form. Thus his yearly surveys of
poetry in the University of Toronto Quarterly between 1951 and 1960,
which were considerably abridged when reprinted in The Bush Garden (a
fact not made clear in that compilation), are now reproduced in the full
text. Above all, these and other items now contain helpful explanatory
notes supplied by the editors, and are fully indexed by author and
subject. As a result, scholars and interested readers can quickly track
down Frye’s comments on almost any Canadian topic. On the debit side,
Frye was an inveterate recycler, so there are many repetitions,
especially of cultural generalizations. But this is a small price to pay
for a more-than-welcome comprehensiveness.

As usual in this series, the editing is generally excellent, though I
did notice a few slips: OE has dropped out of the abbreviations, and the
head-note to item 58 has an incorrect pagination reference. Also,
references to Dilthey (557) and Velikovski (629) surely need separate
identification in 2003.