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Northrop Frye

Author profile

born

July 14, 1912 in Sherbrooke, Canada

died

January 23, 1991

gender

male

genre

Philosophy, Professional & Technical

About this author

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Born in Quebec but raised in New Brunswick, Frye studied at the University of Toronto and Victoria University. He was ordained to the ministry of the United Church of Canada and studied at Oxford before returning to UofT.

His first book, Fearful Symmetry, was published in 1947 to international acclaim. Until then, the prophetic poetry of William Blake had long been poorly understood, considered by some to be delusional ramblings. Frye found in it a system of metaphor derived from Paradise Lost and the Bible. His study of Blake's poetry was a major contribution. Moreover, Frye outlined an innovative manner of studying literature that was to deeply influence the study of literature in general. He was a major influence on, among others, Harold...more

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Books by Northrop Frye

Average rating: 4.11 · 1,095 ratings · 122 reviews · 98 distinct works

	Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays by Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom (Foreword by) 4.06 avg rating — 365 ratings — published 1957 — 12 editions	My rating:
	The Educated Imagination 4.09 avg rating — 247 ratings — published 1963 — 4 editions	My rating:
	Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake by Northrop Frye, Nicholas Halmi (Editor) 4.39 avg rating — 156 ratings — published 1947 — 3 editions	My rating:
	The Great Code: The Bible and Literature 4.19 avg rating — 102 ratings — 10 editions	My rating:
	Northrop Frye on Shakespeare 4.23 avg rating — 30 ratings — 5 editions	My rating:
	The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance 3.78 avg rating — 27 ratings — published 1976 — 2 editions	My rating:
	Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature 4.00 avg rating — 20 ratings — 6 editions	My rating:
	Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays 1974-1988 Northrop Frye 4.08 avg rating — 12 ratings — 2 editions	My rating:
	The Well-Tempered Critic 3.83 avg rating — 12 ratings — published 1963 — 2 editions	My rating:
	The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion 3.73 avg rating — 11 ratings — 3 editions	My rating:

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Quotes by Northrop Frye

“Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell.”
― Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination

8 people liked it

“A snowflake is probably quite unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study even if we are willing to leave its inner mental processes alone.”
― Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays

tags: criticism

6 people liked it

“Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at. [p.93]”
― Northrop Frye, The educated imagination

tags: free-speech , literary-criticism

5 people liked it

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