Northrop Frye - Collected Works. Vol. 27. The Critical Path and Other Writings on Critical Theory 1963-1975

Collected Works of Northrop Frye

VOLUME 27

The Critical Path
and Other Writings on Critical Theory
19631975

The Collected Edition of the Works of Northrop Frye has been planned and is being directed by an editorial committee under the aegis of Victoria University, through its Northrop Frye Centre. The purpose of the edition is to make available authoritative texts of both published and unpublished works, based on an analysis and comparison of all available materials, and supported by scholarly apparatus, including annotation and introductions. The Northrop Frye Centre gratefully acknowledges financial support, through McMaster University, from the Michael G. DeGroote family.

Editorial Committee

General Editor

Alvin A. Lee

Associate Editor

Jean OGrady

Editors

Joseph Adamson

Robert D. Denham

Michael Dolzani

A.C. Hamilton

David Staines

Advisers

Robert Brandeis

Paul Gooch

Eva Kushner

Jane Millgate

Ron Schoeffel

Clara Thomas

Jane Widdicombe

VOLUME 27

Edited by Jean OGrady and Eva Kushner

Victoria University, University of Toronto, and Jean OGrady and
Eva Kushner (preface, introduction, annotation 2009)

Printed in Canada
www.utppublishing.com

ISBN 978-0-8020-9625-8

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Frye, Northrop, 19121991
Critical path and other writings on critical theory, 19631975/
Northrop Frye ; edited by Jean OGrady and Eva Kushner

(Collected works of Northrop Frye ; v. 27)
Includes bibliographical references and index
ISBN 978-0-8020-9625-8

1. Literature History and criticism. 2. Criticism.
I. OGrady, Jean, 1943 II. Kushner, Eva III. Title. IV. Series.

PN81.F752 2008 809 C2008-903838-x

This volume has been published with the assistance of a grant from Victoria University.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

1 The Critical Path:
An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism

This volume includes twenty-seven articles pertaining to literary theory and criticism that Frye wrote during the central period of his career, those coming between critical articles of 1933 to 1963 (in vol. 21 of the Collected Works) and those of 1976 to 1991 (in vol. 18). The earliest-written work, Literary Criticism, dates from 1963, while the latest, Expanding Eyes, was published in 1975. The items in the present volume have been arranged chronologically, except that the text of the book The Critical Path (1971) has been placed first as the cornerstone of the volume. Articles originally given as speeches are ordered according to date of delivery rather than that of publication, though the text may be taken from the printed version; those items with a year date only precede those with a specific day or month.

Headnotes to the individual items specify the copy-text (which is generally the last edition to have been supervised or corrected by Frye), list all known reprintings of the item in English, and also note the existence of typescripts and where they can be found in the Northrop Frye Fonds at the E.J. Pratt Library of Victoria University. All substantive changes to the copy-text are noted in the list of emendations, though changes of accidentals are made silently. All authoritative printed versions have been collated, and, although this is a reading edition rather than a fully critical one, variants of particular interest are given in notes.

In preparing the text, we have followed the general practice of the Collected Works in handling published material from a variety of sources. That is to say, since the conventions of spelling, typography, and to some extent punctuation derive from the different publishers house styles rather than from Frye, we have regularized them silently throughout the volume. For instance, Canadian spellings ending in -our have been substituted for American -or ones, commas have been added before the and in sequences of three, and titles of poems have been italicized. Fryes quotations have been regularized to correspond with the source cited: minor changes of punctuation or capitalization have been made silently, but any substantive change is noted in the emendations list. When, as often, Frye has modernized the spelling, his modernization is retained and remarked upon in the note.

Notes identify the source of all quotations that we have been able to track down. Short identifications of section, act, scene, or line number, of Bible verses, or of page number, have been placed in the text, in square brackets to distinguish them from Fryes own occasional inserted references which are in regular parentheses. Our references, in the case of Classical works, were found in the Loeb editions; for Shakespeare, we used the Riverside Shakespeare. References to Blakes poetry give the plate and line number or appropriate reference, followed by E and the page number The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Page numbers for Fryes major works give the original page number, followed after a slash by the page number in the Collected Works edition, as in FS, 193/195. Notes provided by Frye himself are identified by [NF] following the note; the form of Fryes references has sometimes been changed to correspond with Collected Works style (for instance, roman volume numbers become arabic). Editorial expansions of these notes are in square brackets. Authors and titles mentioned in passing are not annotated, but life dates and date of first publication of books are provided in the index.

A number of people have helped us in the preparation of this volume. We were fortunate in having the research assistance of two dedicated graduate students, Scott Schofield and Erin Reynolds, whom we thank for their substantial contributions to the notes. The staff of Victoria University Library were unfailingly helpful in providing original typescripts from the Northrop Frye Fonds. Others who have answered queries and provided information include Tom Allen, John Baird, Deanne Bogdan, Ellen Charendoff, Robert D. Denham, Michael Dolzani, Rosemary Feal, Nicholas Graham, Troni Grande, Cyrus Hamlin, Alvin Lee, and Stephen Tardif. We are indebted to Germaine Warkentin for her discovery and acquisition of the frontispiece photograph; Stephen Graubard and Jonathan Arac assisted her to identify the occasion and the people depicted. The index was prepared by Jean OGrady. The articles were originally typed or scanned by Alex Stephens. We thank him and also Margaret Burgess, who copy-edited the text with her usual thoroughness and expert knowledge, and saved us from a number of errors. Finally, we are grateful to Alvin Lee for his constant support and encouragement, and to the Northrop Frye Centre for providing us with agreeable colleagues and a favourable space for our work.

We wish to acknowledge the following sources for permission to reprint works previously published by them. We have not been able to determine the copyright status of all the works included in this volume, and welcome notice from any copyright holders who have been inadvertently omitted from these acknowledgments.