Blazing with Artifice: Light from the Northrop Frye Notebooks

Abstract

The notion that Frye's criticism has no historical dimension is commonest among those who know only Anatomy of Criticism. Frye is indeed a structural thinker, yet he is equally a theorist of historical process, and these twin sides of his imagination are Blakean contraries, without which is no progression. The historical side of Frye is minimized in Anatomy, but emerges from a huge mass of unpublished work now edited as part of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye project. This previously unpublished material is capable of revolutionizing our view of Frye, who becomes a more interesting, possibly a more relevant, thinker once we see that his structural side is in creative tension with an equally important opposite. Of the many new paths in Frye studies opened up by access to the notebooks, student essays, diaries, letters, etc., the exploration of Frye's historical side seems most promising.