TRANSCENDING REALISM:
Northrop Frye, the Victorians, and the Anatomy of Criticism
J. Russell Perkin
NORTHROP FRYE’S scholarly career spanned many decades, and he responded to many of the different concerns of each of them. The author of the Anatomy of Criticism and The Modern Century seems to encapsulate the mid-20th century, the era of optimism about technology and unprecedented expansion of higher education. The Critical Path and some of Frye’s essays on education are shaped by the social protest and campus radicalism of the late 1960s. Recognizably a figure of the 1980s, the author of The Great Code and Words With Power is engaged with theoretical questions about language and culture; he also anticipates and influences the re-emergence of religion on the intellectual and political horizons of the 21st century.
But as a Victorianist, I am accustomed to reading thinkers who are obsessed with origins, and if we look at Frye with this in mind we discover that his intellectual origins, as a man who was born in 1912 into a cultural milieu that was not especially forward-looking, were solidly rooted in the 19th century.1 In “Literature and Society,” a 1968 lecture at the University of Saskatchewan and one of his more autobiographical public addresses, Frye describes the form of literary experience that he encountered in the 1920s as “Victorian—Victorian in its moral earnestness, its mixture of idealism and realism, and above all in being entirely a reading culture…. It was inevitable that my reading should be based on the great nineteenth-century novelists, to be followed, in my midteens, with some of the realists who had succeeded them” (RW 178). In this essay, I will concentrate on the Anatomy of Criticism, whose fiftieth anniversary was commemorated by the “New Directions from Old” symposium, and I will attempt to read the Anatomy as a response to this Victorian view of literature, and a critique of those forms of evaluative or social criticism for which Victorian realism was a pinnacle of literary achievement.
Although he is reacting against the Victorians, Frye is by no means dismissive of that period, unlike some writers of the early 20th century, such as Lytton Strachey.2 Frye acknowledges the significance of these writers in an important essay, “The Problem of Spiritual Authority in the Nineteenth Century” (StS 241–256). In fact, after Blake and Milton, some of the thinkers who influenced him most were Victorian prose writers, such as Carlyle, Arnold, Mill, Newman, and especially Ruskin.3 In them he found reference points for his discussions of humanistic education—for what in The Critical Path he terms the “educational contract”4 —and in John Ruskin he found a thinker who had kept alive the tradition of biblical typology. In the Anatomy, Frye notes,
Ruskin has learned his trade from the great iconological tradition which comes down through Classical and Biblical scholarship into Dante and Spenser, both of whom he had studied carefully, and which is incorporated in the medieval cathedrals he had pored over in such detail. (AC 10)5
Frye’s own critical approach, like that of Ruskin, derives from Christian typological interpretation, though in both of these critics there is much more latitude than would be found in orthodox religious exegesis, so that both have something in common with cultural anthropology. Harold Bloom noted the similarity between Ruskin and Frye in the introduction to his anthology of The Literary Criticism of John Ruskin when he wrote,
Ruskin is one of the first, if not indeed the first, “myth” or “archetypal” critic, or more properly he is the linking and transitional figure between allegorical critics of the elder, Renaissance kind, and those of the newer variety, like Northrop Frye, or like W.B. Yeats in his criticism. (xvi)
Bloom’s introduction to a new Princeton University Press edition of the Anatomy in 2000 is a revealing case study in the anxiety of influence.6 He pays tribute to Frye and his resistance to the orthodoxies of the 1950s, but feels compelled to cut the Anatomy down to size, saying that he is not as fond of it as he once was (vii), and that “Anatomy of Criticism, in this year 2000, is not much of a guide to our current wilderness; yet, what is?” (viii). It is interesting to note in passing that Bloom alludes to Matthew Arnold in this statement; Arnold’s biblical trope of “criticism in the wilderness” has had a long life, perhaps because every critic aspires to be Moses.7 Ruskin is also mentioned in Bloom’s introduction; Bloom says that Frye “is probably best thought of as Ruskin a century later” (x). One would have to qualify that by saying that Frye is characteristically far more balanced and less anxious than Ruskin ever managed to be.8
Though Frye may owe more to another, later Victorian, Sir James Frazer, he does indeed have many affinities with John Ruskin. For example, in The Queen of the Air Ruskin defines a myth as “a story with a meaning attached to it, other than it seems to have at first” (296). Frye of course uses the terms “myth” and “mythos” in several distinct senses in the Anatomy, but in the “Tentative Conclusion,” immediately following a reference to The Queen of the Air, he notes that “in literary criticism myth means ultimately mythos, a structural organizing principle of literary form. Commentary, we remember, is allegorization, and any great work of literature may carry an infinite amount of commentary” (AC 341–342). Frye and Ruskin share not only this attitude to myth but also a habit, no doubt derived from their evangelical Protestant childhoods, of ending an essay with what can be called an anagogic conclusion, a visionary passage that often includes a biblical allusion and moves from the immediate topic to something of much wider significance.9 The conclusions to the various essays in the Anatomy illustrate this well, as do many of Frye’s other conclusions; in Ruskin the visionary imagery that concludes each of the two essays in Sesame and Lilies would provide a good example. It may be of related significance that for both critics the public lecture was the genre out of which most of their books evolved; they are both in effect secular preachers.
My focus on Frye and the Victorians arises from the fact that my primary area of specialization as a scholar is the literary and intellectual culture of the Victorian period: the prose writers, poets, and novelists such as Matthew Arnold, Alfred Tennyson, and George Eliot who explore the social and spiritual condition of 19th-century England. I have a strong interest in the realist tradition of English fiction, from Fielding and Richardson through Austen and the great Victorians to James, Conrad, and Forster, and among my guides to that period have been what Frye calls “public critics” (see AC 8), such as the humanists F.R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling, and the Marxists Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton.
I first seriously studied Frye in a course on literary history taught by Professor Brian Corman at the University of Toronto in 1984–1985, and throughout my subsequent teaching career Frye has been the critic and theorist I have found most consistently useful as a guide when teaching literature to undergraduates (I think here especially of the Anatomy and of the writings on Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible and literature). As a result, I have read Frye extensively over the last twenty years. I mention these details as background to the fact that when it came to my own period, Frye’s map of literature did not present a very familiar landscape. Certainly, he talks about the major Victorian cultural prophets, but he also has a lot to say about writers who have not been central to recent trends in the field, for example, William Morris and Samuel Butler. He is far more comfortable discussing Scott as a writer of romance than writing about the Victorian realists,10 and when he does mention major figures in the realist tradition it is often to illuminate them from a surprising perspective, as he does with his comment that “the early novels of George Eliot … are influenced by the romance, and the later ones by the anatomy” (AC 312). Frye’s essay on James, the favourite author of his teacher Pelham Edgar, is certainly not his best piece of criticism, and one initially feels that he misses the point of much of what James is about, but by concentrating on James’s use of romance and occult elements he does draw attention to something essentially strange and significant in James’s fiction, and by the end of it one comes to think that perhaps he understands James quite well after all.11 Frye focuses on a number of James’s lesser-known works, such as The Other House and The Sense of the Past, relating them thematically to the major works and suggesting that James’s preoccupation with ghosts represents his desire to explore the limits of realism: “A ghostly world challenges us with the existence of a reality beyond realism which still may not be identifiable as real” (EAC 122).
One of Frye’s more interesting and extended discussions of realist fiction comes in “Myth, Fiction, and Displacement” (1961), in which he uses as an example Anthony Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset, noting that “the main story line is a kind of parody of a detective novel” (EICT 409). Anticipating later critics influenced by narratology, Frye shows how sophisticated are the narrative techniques employed by Trollope, the apparently artless realist. The action in a Trollope novel, Frye says, is not really the plot but rather “resides in the huge social panorama that the linear events build up” (EICT 409). This explains why in the whole tradition of mimetic fiction from Defoe to Arnold Bennett, the plot is a conventional, mechanical device with connections to the structure of conventionalized popular fiction.
Harold Bloom refers to Frye’s “essentially irenic tendencies” (Foreword ix), and certainly in his published works, as opposed to his diaries and notebooks, Frye rarely disputes the positions of other critics. However, it is possible to read the Anatomy as a largely hidden polemic (a concept I derive from Bakhtin)12 against the ethical criticism of the 20th century that regarded Victorian realism as a high point of literary achievement, thereby denigrating other literary modes that Frye valued highly. F.R. Leavis is not named in the index to the Anatomy, but Frye’s attack on evaluative criticism takes in the judgments of the Scrutiny school as well as the polemics of T.S. Eliot (whom Frye does mention), and Leavis is most evident in the reference to “maturity” as an evaluative criterion. Frye writes that “it is not hard to see prejudice in Arnold, because his views have dated: it is a little harder when ‘high seriousness’ becomes ‘maturity,’ or some other powerful persuader of more recent critical rhetoric” (AC 22).
A.C. Hamilton points out that in saying that criticism is not a matter of value-judgments, Frye is reacting to the influence of Leavis (Northrop 23), although Hamilton also notes that for Leavis himself value-judgments are not prior to engagement with the text (21). But Frye did not think that it was the task of the literary critic to construct traditions, or as we might say today, canons; he often says that traditions construct themselves, by virtue of the fact that some texts are more rewarding to study than others, and some texts—his usual example is Shakespeare— just refuse to go away.13 He concludes the “Polemical Introduction” to the Anatomy with a discussion of value judgments (AC 20–29), and returns to the issue in the “Tentative Conclusion,” where he links such judgments to social anxieties, and glances again at Leavis with a reference to “great traditions”:
Culture may be employed by a social or intellectual class to increase its prestige; and in general, moral censors, selectors of great traditions, apologists of religious or political causes, aesthetes, radicals, codifiers of great books and the like, are expressions of such class tensions. (AC 346)
Frye explores this line of thought further in The Critical Path.
Frye does explicitly mention Leavis in “Criticism, Visible and Invisible”:
F.R. Leavis has always commanded a good deal of often reluctant respect because of the moral intensity he brings to his criticism, and because of his refusal to make unreal separations between moral and aesthetic values. Reading through the recent reprint of Scrutiny, one feels at first that this deep concern for literature, whether the individual judgements are right or wrong, is the real key to literary experience, and the real introduction that criticism can make to it. But as one goes on one has the feeling that this concern, which is there and is a very real virtue, gets deflected at some crucial point, and is prevented from fully emerging out of the shadow-battles of anxieties. (StS 79)
Criticism for Frye is of course a structure of knowledge, not a matter of taste or evaluation. It is interesting that he illustrates this in the introduction to the Anatomy by a contrast between two Victorian sages, Arnold and Ruskin. Frye compares Ruskin’s analysis of the meaning of some of the names of Shakespeare’s characters—what Frye calls one of the “curious, brilliant, scatter-brained footnotes to Munera Pulveris”—with Matthew Arnold’s condemnation of Ruskin’s analysis as “a piece of extravagance” in which Ruskin, forgetting “all moderation and proportion,” betrays “the note of provinciality” (AC 9). According to Frye, Ruskin “is attempting genuine criticism” (9), while “it is Arnold who is the provincial” (10). At the end of the Anatomy, Frye notes that Ruskin’s Queen of the Air is a late example of the allegorization of myth that was so common in medieval and Renaissance criticism (341).
Frye offers his own contribution of archetypal criticism not as the one correct form of criticism but rather as the level that helps make connections among all the other approaches. From the perspective of my own teaching experience, I find this one of the most valuable enduring insights in the Anatomy. I advertise my first-year introduction to literature course as featuring texts “from Sophocles to Steven Spielberg,” and I have found that the most helpful way to assist students to order their literary experience is to look at the archetypal patterns that link ancient texts, canonical English texts, and contemporary popular culture. This seems to me a much more valuable form of cultural studies than applying modish and tendentious theoretical models to the products of the contemporary cultural industry.14
It is not news to point out that Frye regards what in the second essay of the Anatomy he calls the “descriptive” level of meaning as of secondary importance in literary interpretation: it is preceded by the “literal” and is only a step on the way to the archetypal and anagogic phases. For Frye, literature is not primarily about knowledge of the world, and this relegates to secondary status much psychological as well as social and political criticism.15 He discusses this issue in The Critical Path, where he puts the Anatomy of Criticism into context, explaining how it was opposed to the deterministic criticisms that sought to ground literary study in some other discipline (characteristically, Frye refers to Freudian biographical studies as the “Luther-on-the-privy” approach [CP 18]). This clears the way for Frye to write about how he thinks criticism can be genuinely socially engaged; one would do well to remember that The Critical Path is subtitled An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism.16 It would be salutary if present-day students of literature could be introduced to Frye’s analysis of the conceptual framework appropriate for literary study, for at the moment it seems that one’s least literate student is able to critique Western patriarchal imperialism in virtually any text that is assigned, even if the text has not been read, and no self-respecting job candidate would dare give an interview talk without prominently advertising the interdisciplinary theorists on whom his or her approach was grounded.
In attacking the realist tradition, and lingering Victorian pieties, Frye had a major Victorian precursor in Oscar Wilde, as he acknowledges a number of times. In his book on the Anatomy of Criticism, A.C. Hamilton notes the importance of Wilde’s influence on Frye.17 In his notorious English Institute paper, W.K. Wimsatt made a glancing reference to Wilde as part of his general disparagement of Frye’s critical achievement (107); Frye blandly replied that Wimsatt must have found “much more than beautifully cadenced nonsense” in his work, since Wimsatt got a number of things right, including the influence of Wilde’s “Decay of Lying,” “which Messrs. Ellmann and Feidelson were quite right in putting at the beginning of their collection of documents of The Modern Tradition” (“Reflections” 134). In “The Double Mirror,” the acknowledgment of Wilde comes with more than a hint of envy, perhaps even an anxiety about belatedness: “It was Oscar Wilde who defined, in two almost unreasonably brilliant essays, the situation of criticism today” (NFR 87). For Frye, Wilde marks the beginning of modern criticism, as the comment in response to Wimsatt makes evident, and Frye is ahead of his time in taking Wilde seriously as the last of the Victorian cultural prophets, rather than just seeing him as an aesthete and comic dramatist.
Wilde’s criticism plays a central role in Creation and Recreation. There Frye writes,
I find it easy to get hooked on Wilde. His style often makes him sound dated, and yet he is consistently writing from a point of view at least half a century later than his actual time. He is one of our few genuinely prophetic writers, and, as with other prophets, everything he writes seems either to lead up to his tragic confrontation with society or reflect back on it. (NFR 36–37)
Frye often asserted, as he does in the Anatomy, that the direct experience of literature is not something that can be communicated (AC 11–12); what is taught is knowledge about literature—that is, the criticism of literature. Frye’s distinguishing between experience and knowledge explores what Wilde puts much more epigrammatically in “The Critic as Artist”: “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught” (349). As an educator, Frye would probably not have wanted to endorse that statement, but at the same time it is clear that the scholarly study of literature is just the stage on which Frye hopes that a visionary experience will be enacted for both the student and the teacher.18 “Reflections in a Mirror,” Frye’s 1966 response to the English Institute papers discussing his work, contains a very interesting comment on Lionel Trilling’s “On the Teaching of Modern Literature.” After summarizing Trilling’s argument, Frye states,
There is no way out of this: for better or worse, criticism is part of an educational process in which Macbeth is taught to children, and in which a certain insulation against emotional impact is a sign of cultivated taste. Teachers are occupationally disposed to believe in magic, and it is not surprising that many of them should cherish the illusion that they are best able to charge their students’ batteries directly with the authors they teach if they do not admit, even to themselves, that all teaching is a transposition of literature into criticism, of passion and power and anguish into pattern and craftsmanship and the following of convention. If, that is, they can keep on assuming that the direct experience of literature can somehow be, if not actually taught, at least communicated. (138)
Wilde’s dialogue “The Critic as Artist” equates criticism and creativity, rejecting Arnold’s notion that criticism is the activity of the desert, prior to the promised land of a creative epoch. Art should not imitate life, as does the tedious three-volume novel that “anybody can write” (358). “For,” Wilde writes, “Life is terribly deficient in form,” and therefore, from “the artistic point of view,” it is “a failure,” whereas “there is no mood or passion that Art cannot give us” (375). Similarly, the critic’s task is not, as Matthew Arnold thought it to be, to see the object as it really is; in the view of Wilde’s Socratic interlocutor Gilbert, “the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not” (369). Art is the product of the creative imagination, not of sincere passions, or, as Wilde so memorably puts it, in a phrase beloved of Harold Bloom: “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling” (398). Writing at the end of the 19th century, Wilde anticipated the turn of critical attention to the role of the reader that would come in the next century, with the demise of the notion of the artist as a unique and superior order of human being. Wilde’s critic is the exemplary or ideal reader, or, in Frye’s words in Creation and Recreation, “the representative reader” (NFR 75).
These issues are also explored in Wilde’s briefer dialogue “The Decay of Lying,” which is a sustained attack on the Victorian doctrine of realism and the Wordsworthian pieties about nature.19 The speakers are named Cyril and Vivian, after Wilde’s sons. “The Decay of Lying” anticipates much that Frye has to say in his critical works. As Frye sums up the dialogue in Creation and Recreation, its main thesis “is that man does not live directly and nakedly in nature like the animals, but within an envelope that he has constructed out of nature, the envelope usually called culture or civilization” (NFR 37). The verbal part of this envelope is what Frye analyzes as mythology, the total structure of language created by human beings, with literature at its heart. Wilde laments the way that the Church of England has embraced rationalism, for it seems to him a silly concession to realism. He writes,
As for the Church I cannot conceive anything better for the culture of a country than the presence in it of a body of men whose duty it is to believe in the supernatural, to perform daily miracles, and to keep alive that mythopoeic faculty which is so essential for the imagination. (317)
In the maxims of his new aesthetics, at the conclusion of “The Decay of Lying,” Wilde says that life imitates art far more often than art imitates life, and that the proper aim of art is the telling of lies, in the sense of beautiful untrue things (what Frye less poetically will call hypothetical verbal structures). “As a method,” Vivian tells Cyril, “realism is a complete failure,” giving us literary works with characters so devoid of interest that “they would pass unnoticed in a third-class railway carriage” (303).
As Frye interprets Wilde, the desire for realism is a search for emotional reassurance, the desire to find something recognizable in a work of art rather than allowing oneself to be confronted with the strangeness of a truly creative vision. Wilde satirizes the tedious realism, as he sees it, of the 19th-century novel, notably Mary Augusta Ward’s Robert Elsmere, but he reserves his most scathing language for the fiction of Zola, whose characters “have their dreary vices, and their drearier virtues. The record of their lives is absolutely without interest. Who cares what happens to them?” (296). These unreadable works all result from the mistaken idea that the artist should imitate nature, when really it is nature that imitates art. Wilde also denies that Balzac is a realist: “He created life, he did not copy it,” and his “imaginative reality” is contrasted with Zola’s “unimaginative realism” (299).
Frye himself is not so dismissive of Zola. He agrees with Wilde to the extent that he sees Zola, along with Dreiser, as exemplary of “the documentary naturalism” in which “literature goes about as far as a representation of life, to be judged by its accuracy of description rather than by its integrity as a structure of words, as it could go and still remain literature” (AC 79–80). Zola thus is largely to be identified with the descriptive phase of literary symbolism, as Frye defines it in the second essay of the Anatomy. On the other hand, if the critic stands back even from a novel by Zola, the “organizing design” or “archetypal organization” will become apparent: “If we ‘stand back’ from a realistic novel such as Tolstoy’s Resurrection or Zola’s Germinal, we can see the mythopoeic designs indicated by those titles” (140).
I will conclude this discussion with a more extended quotation from one of the rhapsodically poetic passages that occur frequently in Wilde’s dialogues.20 The imagery of this passage calls to mind Frye’s account of the anagogic phase of symbolism, and it is interesting that Wilde even uses the word “archetypes”:
Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror. She has flowers that no forests know of, birds that no woodland possesses. She makes and unmakes many worlds, and can draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread. Hers are the ‘forms more real than living man,’ and hers the great archetypes of which things that have existence are but unfinished copies. Nature has, in her eyes, no laws, no uniformity. She can work miracles at her will, and when she calls monsters from the deep they come. (“Decay” 306)
Considering that Frye was one of the first to portray Wilde as a serious thinker, perhaps the current serious interest in Wilde can serve to show a way back to Frye’s criticism, even for those of an earnestly trivial turn of mind. As I have implied earlier, I think a recovery of the key points made in the Anatomy of Criticism offers the best hope of avoiding the mindless gulf that seems to be opening between literary studies and cultural studies, since Frye knows so much more about both of those practices, and about the connections between them, than most people currently engaged in either of them.
ENDNOTES
1 It is worth noting that Frye’s parents were married in the late 19th century—John Ayre describes their marriage in a section of his book entitled “A Nineteenth-Century Home” (19–23)—and that Northrop Frye, their third child, was born when his mother was forty-one years old. In the interviews with David Cayley, Frye describes himself as in effect having been “brought up by grandparents” (Northrop 42).
2 One writer with whom the young Frye felt many affinities was George Bernard Shaw, and I am grateful to Germaine Warkentin for pointing this out to me. While Frye came to reject Shaw’s social utopianism, preferring Spengler’s “vision of cultural history” to “the onward-and-upward people … such as Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, who had obviously got it wrong” (SM 113), he refers to Shaw frequently, and his own epigrammatic wit and trenchant style surely owe something to Shaw.
3 Ruskin is prominently mentioned in A.C. Hamilton’s list of thinkers who influenced Frye (Northrop 213). In “Expanding Eyes,” Frye says that Ruskin had “come to influence me a great deal” (SM 111). Frye’s fascination with Victorian prose can be connected to the Nineteenth-Century Thought course he taught. See Robert Denham’s Introduction to Frye’s diaries (Diaries xxvii) and numerous references to the course throughout the diaries. Frye describes how he came to teach the course in “The Critic and the Writer” (WE 472). See also “Some Reflections on Life and Habit,” MM 141.
4 See CP, Part Seven, 158–171. Toward the end of the book, Frye writes that “the chief mythical schemata of the twentieth century were outlined in the nineteenth, and a critic concerned with the stereotypes of social mythology finds little that is essentially new in this field in the century since Culture and Anarchy” (166).
5 See Frye’s review of Joan Evans’s John Ruskin (Canadian Forum, 1955): “The thing that seems to me to hold Ruskin together is iconography: the sense of a vast system of design and occult correspondences manifesting itself in art and revealed by nature, which inspires alike his interest in architecture and in crystals, in the Bible and in clouds, in Greek myths and in brotherhoods of devout gardeners” (ENC 243).
6 Robert Denham discusses the complexities of Bloom’s relationship to Frye in his own Editor’s Introduction to Anatomy; see AC2 xvii–xix, lxi–lxiv.
7 See my study of Arnold and Frye for the dynamics of Frye’s love-hate relationship with Arnold. Bloom does not mention Arnold very frequently, especially not his work as a critic.
8 In “Literature as Possession,” Frye wrote, “There have been many great critics, such as Coleridge or Ruskin, or their followers like G.K. Chesterton and others, who seem to be incapable of making an aesthetic judgment. They make no statement about literature not coloured by anxieties of some kind” (EICT 305).
9 This habit of Frye’s is noted by Lee (Introduction to NFR xix) and by Pásztor (124).
10 Scott is a very frequent point of reference in The Secular Scripture. See in particular the autobiographical anecdote at the beginning of the book (SeS 4–6).
11 See “Henry James and the Comedy of the Occult” (EAC 109–129). James has been an author of particular interest to those critics concerned with the relationship between literature and society whom Frye terms public critics. Some examples that come to mind are F.R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Cynthia Ozick, Joseph Epstein, and Martha Nussbaum.
12 In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin writes that “in a hidden polemic the author’s discourse is directed toward its own referential object, as is any other discourse, but at the same time every statement about the object is constructed in such a way that, apart from its referential meaning, a polemical blow is struck at the other’s discourse on the same theme, at the other’s statement about the same object” (195). David Lodge notes in After Bakhtin that “scholarly discourse is in fact saturated in the kind of dialogic rhetoric that Bakhtin named ‘hidden polemic’” (94), but most critics cite or name their adversaries to a greater degree than does Frye. Given Leavis’s fondness for controversy, one even wonders whether Frye consciously avoided naming him in the Anatomy.
13 The discussion of value judgments was one of the most controversial aspects of the Anatomy, and Frye revisits the topic in the 1965 “Letter to the English Institute,” in the 1968 essay “On Value-Judgments” (StS 66–73), and in the 1975 essay “Expanding Eyes” (SM 99–122), among other places. In his foreword to the Anatomy, Bloom wonders whether Frye’s faith that canons can construct themselves without the need for overt value judgments would have survived in an age when “Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and Lady Mary Chudleigh have usurped the eminence of John Milton and Andrew Marvell.” Then, realizing that he is trying to project his own anxieties onto the shade of Frye, he concedes, “His high sense of irony doubtless would sustain him” (viii).
14 As Hayden White observes, practitioners of cultural studies “have not on the whole found much of use in Frye’s work” (29), in part because of the heavy Marxist influence on the field. However, both White and Wang Ning argue for the relevance of Frye’s work to cultural studies. See also A.C. Hamilton’s comments in “Legacy,” especially 8–13. Robert Denham comments in “A Frye Centre Proposal” that Frye’s cultural criticism is “a dimension of his thought that merits more attention than it has received” (3).
15 Robert Alter has taken issue with this approach as it manifests itself in Frye’s manner of reading the Bible. Alter’s own critical practice, before he turned to the literary analysis of the Bible, was shaped by his comparatist study of the European tradition of the novel; Frye, who was not a linguist in the way that Alter is, was formed by his study of Renaissance comedy and the traditions of romance and mythopoeic epic.
16 Similarly, it is easy to forget that the subtitle of Culture and Anarchy is An Essay in Political and Social Criticism.
17 Hamilton discusses Wilde and Frye several times. See especially 276n29. Michael Dolzani describes Wilde’s “Decay of Lying” as one of Frye’s “favourite works of criticism” in an interview included in the first of the three cbc programs comprising David Cayley’s The Ideas of Northrop Frye.
18 See also the discussion of literary experience and literary scholarship in section 1 of cp, especially 25–33.
19 Compare this passage from Frye’s essay “The Rhythms of Time”: “Later in the century, Oscar Wilde remarked, in The Decay of Lying, which is really a manifesto of romantic and mythical writing as opposed to realism: ‘M. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire now? It is out of date. Life goes on faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of Life’” (MM 167). Frye alludes to the same passage from Wilde, without directly quoting it, in Creation and Recreation (NFR 39).
20 In an excellent introduction to an anthology of Wilde’s prose, Linda Dowling writes of Wilde’s “‘poetic’ prose” that “nothing has worn less well with modern-day readers, perhaps, than this sort of elaborate writing” (xxv), but she adds perceptively, “yet the point of such passages in their original contexts is always clear: they are evidence of the global change that may be wrought in individual consciousness by imaginative art. The critic speaks differently because the world has become different to him” (xxvi).
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———. 2006. The Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933– 1963. The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Vol. 21. Ed. Germaine Warkentin. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
———. 2005. Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Vol. 17. Ed. Imre Salusinszky. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
———. 2001. The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942–1955. The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Vol. 8. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
———. 2000. Northrop Frye on Religion Excluding The Great Code and Words with Power. The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Vol. 4. Ed. Alvin A. Lee and Jean O’Grady. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
———. 2000. Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education. The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Vol. 7. Ed. Jean O’Grady and Goldwin French. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 470–475.
———. 1990. Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974–1988, ed. Robert D. Denham. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia.
———. 1990. Reading the World: Selected Writings, 1935–1976, ed. Robert D. Denham. New York: Peter Lang.
———. 1976. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 1976. Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press.
———. 1971. The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press.
———. 1970. The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society. London: Methuen.
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