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 Frye’s 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 (1931–33) and his three years at Emmanuel College (1933–36). Two papers—one on prose fiction and the other on Calvin—are 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 Frye’s 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 Frye’s 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.
Frye’s 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 Frye’s sources—the 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 Frye’s 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 O’Grady and for two by Marc Plamondon: my debts to them are recorded following the notes for which they were responsible.
I have regularized Frye’s 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 Frye’s 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 Frye’s 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 Frye’s 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 Frye’s instructors have been recorded in the notes.
All of Frye’s sources that I could locate have been identified. It should perhaps be noted that, as a student, Frye was often rather careless in following the conventions of scholarly practice. In these essays he frequently misquotes his sources and occasionally gives an incorrect citation, refers to book titles that do not exist, puts paraphrases within quotation marks, and cites sources that argue the opposite of what he claims; and he sometimes gives the impression of having consulted primary texts when in fact he is drawing upon secondary sources. The mis-quotations have been silently corrected, and the other problems in his handling of his sources are recorded in the notes.
The abbreviations used in the notes and headnotes are standard. “NF” in the notes signifies Northrop Frye, and “NFF” in the notes and in the headnotes stands for the Northrop Frye Fonds in the Victoria University Library. Four works are represented in the notes with the following abbreviations or shortened forms:
DW = Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, rev. ed., 2 vols. New York: Knopf, 1928.
GB = Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough, 12 vols. London: Macmillan, 1911–14. References are to the 3rd ed., except for vol. 4, The Dying God, which is the 1st ed.
Corrrespondence = The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932–1939, ed. Robert D. Denham. 2 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996.
Ayre = John Ayre, Northrop Frye: A Biography. Toronto: Random House, 1989.
These essays are published with the kind permission of the executors of the Northrop Frye estate, Jane Widdicombe and Roger Ball, and the Victoria University Library. I owe debts of gratitude also to the Northrop Frye Centre at Victoria University, which, at the initiative of Dr. Eva Kushner, conceived the idea of publishing Frye’s works in a collected edition; to John M. Robson, who served as the first general editor, and to his successor, Alvin Lee; to Roseann Runte, president of Victoria University, for her support of the project; and to Robert Brandeis, librarian at Victoria University, for the assistance he and his staff have continued to provide me. I am also indebted to Christine Cable, who put the texts of Frye’s typescripts onto computer disks, to Patricia W. Scott, for tracking down for me scores of books through interlibrary loan, to Margaret Burgess, for her expert copy-editing, and to the following people who have responded to my queries or provided other kinds of assistance: Julia Annas, John Ayre, A.S. Bendall, Daniel Breazeale, Janie Cottis, James Carscallen, Edwin M. Curley, Peter Dale, Scott D. Denham, Douglas John Den Uyl, Bernard F. Dukore, Ian Duncan, Gail Gibson, Bruce Golden, Burkhard Henke, Robin Jackson, Karen James, Douglas Jay, Kingsley Joblin, Hugh Kenner, Gwin Kolb, James Lawler, William A. Little, Frank Lucash, Maurice Luker, Linda Miller, Hugh Moorhouse, Pierre-François Moreau, Barbara J. Patterson, Linda Peterson, Claude Pichois, Barry Quails, C.D.C. Reeve, T.G. Rosenmeyer, Florinda Ruiz, Julian Rushton, Tilman Seebass, R. Larry Todd, Stanley Weintraub, Garron Wells, and Thomas Willard. I express my gratitude to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a fellowship that provided a year of uninterrupted time to edit the unpublished Frye papers and to Roanoke College for its support, financial and otherwise, of the project. Finally, the dedication is an imperfect effort to express my thanks to a person whose generous support of his alma mater has played an indirect though substantial role in the publication of this volume, as well as the Frye–Kemp correspondence.