Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (review)

Abstract

Northrop Frye’s literary career proved the exception to most rules. After a few early articles in Canadian journals, he achieved international fame overnight with the publication of his first book, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (). He then wrote a series of high profile articles for literary journals, mostly in the .., that he gathered and transformed into the immensely influential Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (). His posthumous publications have also been unusual. In , only five years after his death, e Collected Works of Northrop Frye began to appear, and they began where the collected works of other writers tend to end, with volumes of letters, diaries, and notebooks. Scholarly editions of the Anatomy and Fearful Symmetry are now in active preparation, but even before they are printed Frye’s readers have access to his personal reflections about these and other books. Such readers, whose interests include religion and culture as well as literature, are fortunate indeed. Nietzsche’s readers had to wait almost seventy years after his death for a scholarly edition of the Nachgelassene Fragmente, to which Frye makes reference, having had first to deal with his sister’s selective arrangement in Der Wille zur Macht. Jung’s readers have still to see most of his Rotbuch or any of his Schwarzbuch, access to which has been blocked by heirs and given only recently to the Philemon Foundation. Readers of Samuel Butler and James George Frazer, who edited their own notebooks, will never know what materials were discarded in the process. However, Frye’s readers have an embarrassment of riches. ose who prefer a bedside book have Northrop Frye Unbuttoned: Wit and Wisdom from the Notebooks and Diaries, selected by the immensely energetic Robert D. Denham, who knows the unpublished materials better than anyone else. ose who want the original context but without the complications of Frye’s crabbed handwriting have the “late notebooks” and Bible notebooks edited by Denham, as well as the letters and diaries. Now they have two volumes edited by Denham’s associate Michael Dolzani, who once served as Frye’s research assistant. e notebooks connected with Frye’s projected but unwritten “third book” after Fearful Symmetry and the Anatomy appeared in , and those connected with his work on literary romance appeared at the end of . Unlike Nietzsche, who kept one notebook at a time, Frye used different notebooks for different subjects, often returning to one after a space