Canadian Literature Collection

Eminent Northrop Frye scholar Robert D. Denham explores the connection between Frye and twelve writers who influenced his thinking but about whom he didn't write anything expansive. Denham draws especially on Frye's notebooks and other previously unpublished texts, now available in the Collected Works of Frye. Such varied thinkers as Aristotle, Lewis Carroll, Søren Kierkegaard, and Paul Tillich emerge as important figures in defining Frye's cross-disciplinary interests. Eventually, the twelve "Others" of the title come to represent a space occupied by writers whose interests paralleled Frye's and helped to establish his own critical universe. Published in English.

Robert D. Denham pursues his quest to uncover the links between Northrop Frye and writers and others who directly influenced his thinking but about whom he did not write an extensive commentary. The first chapter is about Frye's reading of Patanjali, the founder of the philosophy of Hindu yoga, while the second, discusses cultural mythographer Giambattista Vico, literary history and poetic language. The focus of Frye's criticism was the verbal arts, but he also had an abiding interest in both the visual arts and music; hence Frye's admiration of J.S. Bach. The essay on Tolkien examines the tendency in literary history to return from irony to myth, as well as the role that Tolkien played in Frye's fiction-writing fantasies. In subsequent chapters, Denham explores Frye's preference for romance and his critique of realism, which run parallel to the views of Oscar Wilde, and their strong shared convictions about the centripetal thrust of art, and about criticism being as creative as literature. Frye's appreciation for Whitehead's concept of interpenetration in Science in the Modern World became a key feature of Frye's speculations about the highest reaches of literature and religion. Frye is clearly indebted to Martin Buber, particularly his influential meditation I and Thou. Aristotle, an important influence upon Frye, was partially filtered through R.S. Crane and his The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry. Finally, the relationship between Frye and his Oxford tutor Edmund Blunden are explored, while the last is an essay on Frye and M.H. Abrams on how Frye's critical project might be viewed developed in Abrams's The Mirror and the Lamp. Published in English.

This book, based on extensive archival and historical work, identifies and brings to light additional and littlerecognized intellectual influences on Frye, and analyzes how they informed his thought. These are variously major thinkers, sets of texts, and intellectual traditions: the Mahayana Sutras, Machiavelli, Rabelais, Boehme, Hegel, Coleridge, Carlyle, Mill, Jane Ellen Harrison and Elizabeth Fraser. In each chapter, dedicated to Frye's connection to a specific influence, Denham describes how Frye became acquainted with each, and how he interpreted and adapted certain ideas from them to help work out his own conceptual systems. Denham offers insights on Frye's relationship with his historical and intellectual contexts, provides valuable additional context for understanding the work of one of the 20th century's leading scholars of literature and culture. Includes over 20 photos, tables and figures, as well as a chapter on Frye's personal relationship with Elizabeth Fraser. Published in English.

This volume comprises a reprinting and gloss of the original text of the 1933 Communist play Eight Men Speak. The play was banned by the Toronto police after its first performance, banned by the Winnipeg police shortly thereafter and subsequently banned by the Canadian Post Office. The play can be considered as one stage-the published text-of a meta-text that culminated in 1934 at Maple Leaf Gardens when the (then illegal) Communist Party of Canada celebrated the release of its leader, Tim Buck, from prison. Eight Men Speak had been written and staged on behalf of the campaign to free Buck by the Canadian Labour Defence League, the public advocacy group of the CPC. In its theatrical techniques, incorporating avant-garde expressionist staging, mass chant, agitprop and modernist dramaturgy, Eight Men Speak exemplified the vanguardist aesthetics of the Communist left in the years before the Popular Front. It is the first instance of the collective theatrical techniques that would become widespread in subsequent decades and formative in the development of modern Canadian drama. These include a decentred narrative, collaborative authorship and a refusal of dramaturgical linearity in favour of theatricalist demonstration. As such it is one of the most significant Canadian plays of the first half of the century, and, on the evidence of the surviving photograph of the mise-en-scene, one of the earliest examples of modernist staging in Canada. Published in English.