Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936-1989

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.

This 10th volume of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye is something of
a rag-bag, but is no less interesting for that. Two items in particular
stand out.

It begins with a not-quite-finished introduction to a never-published
Survey of British Literature, which runs to well over a hundred pages.
It seems to me an ideal statement, packed with useful—indeed,
essential—information for literary students, and is especially
interesting because Frye’s preoccupation with symbols and archetypes
is presented within a context that involves literary history and a
currently unfashionable but eminently worthy respect for the “canon”
of classic works. This context gives Frye’s views of literature an
impressiveness as part of a larger whole which they do not possess when
offered as “all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.” Despite
its note-form ending, it deserves to be published on its own; serious
students would find it a revelation in this age of jargon-ridden
“theory.”

The second section of special note contains essays and reviews that
Frye made while working with the Canadian Radio-television and
Telecommunications Commission. Here one sees an original thinker
developing his ideas about television as a new and rapidly evolving art
form. His reviews of individual programs are shrewd, witty, unabashedly
evaluative, and original. It is, however, sad that he spent so much time
on a lost cause, present-day TV being worse, if anything, than it was
when these critiques were offered in the 1970s.

The rest is run-of-the-mill stuff: a graduate essay on The Canterbury
Tales (that should surely have appeared in Vol. 2), some articles on
social matters that repeat what he has said before, a few mildly
condescending reviews of books for the CBC, three convocation addresses,
and other odds and ends. These are useful to have accessible in the
interests of completeness, but will not add to his reputation. The two
sections I have highlighted are, however, vintage and essential Frye.