Frye Northrop. - Northrop Fryes student essays. Denham, 1932-1938

COLLECTED WORKS OF NORTHROP FRYE

VOLUME 3

Northrop Fryes Student Essays

Edited by Robert D. Denham

Frye was a person of uncommon gifts, and very little that came from his pen is without interest. So writes Robert Denham in his introduction to this unique collection of twenty-two papers written by Northrop Frye during his student years. Made public only after Fryes death in 1991, all but one of the essays are published here for the first time.

The majority of these papers were written for courses at Emmanuel College, the theology school of Victoria College at the University of Toronto. Essays such as The Concept of Sacrifice, The Fertility Cults, and The Jewish Background of the New Testament reveal the links between Fryes early research in theology and the form and content of his later criticism. It is clear that, even as a theology student, Fryes first impulse was always that of the cultural critic. The papers on Calvin, Eliot, Chaucer, Wyndham Lewis, and on the forms of prose fiction show Frye as precociously witty, rigorous, and incisivea gifted writer who clearly found his voice before his last undergraduate year.

David Lodge wrote in the New Statesman: There are not many critics whose twenty-year-old book reviews one can read with pleasure and instruction, but Frye is an exception to most rules. Northrop Fryes student essays provide pleasure and instruction through their comments on the Augustinian view of history, on beauty, truth, and goodness, and on literary symbolism and tradition.

ROBERT D. DENHAM is John P. Fishwick Professor of English at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. He is author and editor of several books on Northrop Frye, the most recent being The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 19321939; The Legacy of Northrop Frye (co-edited with Alvin Lee), and The Eternal Act of Creation: Essays on Northrop Frye, 19791990.

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 The purpose of the edition is to make available authoritative texts of both published and unpublished works, based on analysis and comparison of all available materials, and supported by scholarly apparatus, including annotation and introductions.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

Assistant Editor

Jean OGrady

Editors

Joseph Adamson

Robert D. Denham

Michael Dolzani

A.C. Hamilton

David Staines

Advisers

Robert Brandeis

Eleanor Cook

J.R. de J. Jackson

Eva Kushner

Jane Millgate

Roseann Runte

Ron Schoeffel

Clara Thomas

Jane Widdicombe

VOLUME 3

Edited by Robert D. Denham

Estate of Northrop Frye (student essays) and Robert D. Denham (preface, introduction, annotation) 1997

Printed in the U.S.A.
www.utppublishing.com

Reprinted in paperback 2014

ISBN 978-0-80204235-4 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-44262686-7 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Frye, Northrop, 19121991
Northrop Fryes student essays, 19321938 / edited by Robert D. Denham.

(Collected works of Northrop Frye ; v. 3)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-80204253-4 (bound). ISBN 978-1-44262686-7 (pbk.)

1. Christianity. 2. English literature History and Criticism. I. Denham,
Robert D. II. Title. III. Series: Collected works of Northrop Frye ; v. 3

PN 37.F71997 230 C97931089-X

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 Canada Book Fund.

For John P. Fishwick

The student essays of Northrop Frye were among the large body of manuscripts deposited in the Victoria University Library at the University of Toronto following Fryes death in 1991. The essays collected here include all of the extant papers Frye wrote for courses during his final two years at Victoria College (193133) and his three years at Emmanuel College (193336). Two papersone on prose fiction and the other on Calvinare of uncertain date and provenance, but they seem to come from his Toronto student days or shortly thereafter. Two additional essays can be traced to Fryes time at Oxford. I have not included The Social Significance of Music, a 1935 talk Frye presented to a group in Toronto called the Society of Incompatibles, because practically all of that paper repeats material from part 3 of Fryes essay on Romanticism, written two years earlier. I have also excluded an untitled holograph manuscript on Chaucer which Frye wrote when he was at Merton College: most of that paper was incorporated into the essay on Chaucer that is included here. The headnote for each paper records the course or other occasion for which the paper was written, as best I can determine that information, and gives the location of the paper in the Northrop Frye Papers at the Victoria University Library.

Fryes published works were seldom annotated, and when he did provide notes they were often sketchy at best. This is a practice that began with his student essays. The notes in the present volume focus on Fryes sourcesthe passages he quotes or paraphrases and the works which he refers to or relies on. The annotations for prose works are ordinarily to editions that are readily accessible, not necessarily the ones Frye himself consulted, although these are sometimes noted; for poetry, I have generally provided only titles, dates, and line numbers. This procedure should enable readers who want to consult Fryes sources to do so fairly easily. In a few cases editing conventions have been adopted for particular essays; these are recorded in the headnotes. The annotations provided by Frye himself are identified with [NF] following the note. For seven of the essays Frye provided bibliographies. As these exist in various degrees of completeness, I have supplemented the information he gives, either within square brackets in the bibliography itself or in a separate note. All other material in square brackets is an editorial addition. Information for three of the notes was provided by Jean OGrady and for two by Marc Plamondon: my debts to them are recorded following the notes for which they were responsible.

I have regularized Fryes spelling, capitalization, and punctuation to conform to current conventions. The titles of works, which Frye sometimes underlined, have been italicized throughout. Frye wrote swiftly, and it is likely that for some of the essays the first draft was the final draft. Five of his Emmanuel College essays, for example, were written during a four-day period. These essays, then, though obviously the fruit of considerable thought, are not the product of careful revision, which was to be Fryes later practice; consequently, the syntax occasionally goes awry. But on the principle that it is better to retain a sense of the original dispatch, I have resisted the temptation to rewrite Fryes prose, except in a few cases where problems of agreement, parallel structure, and the like seemed to call for correction. All such substantive changes, including the occasional addition of an omitted word, are noted in the list of emendations. Some of the essays do contain Fryes holograph corrections and additions. I have retained the changes that he himself made to the typescripts, though I have not noted these changes unless there was some reason for doing so. Marginal comments and other markings made by Fryes instructors have been recorded in the notes.