A Northrop Frye Chrestomathy

Book excerpt: This chrestomathy is a selection of passages from the previously unpublished writings of Northrop Frye, much of it coming from his notebooks and diaries, which are now a part of his Collected Works (1996–2012). The passages, arranged alphabetically, form a discontinuous series of reflections on diverse topics that are worthy of extracting from their original source. The passages gathered here are aphoristic, insightful, clever, startling, amusing, contrarian, curious, powerful, salty, irreverent, unguarded, or otherwise noteworthy in the way they reveal Frye’s fertile mind at work. Frye is Canada’s greatest literary critic, and a good argument can be made that he is the greatest critical presence internationally of the last century. This book showcases the seeds of the ideas he often developed in his books and essays. The passages range widely across Frye’s sixty-year writing career, extending from the early 1930s until just before his death in 1991.