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The Secular Scripture and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976-1991

Northrop Frye (Author), Joseph Adamson (Edited by), Jean Wilson (Edited by)

9780802039453

Hardback, published 1 July 2006

625 pages
23.1 x 15.7 x 5.1 cm, 1.06 kg

Northrop Frye’s The Secular Scripture was first published in 1976 and was soon recognized as one of his most influential works, reflecting an extensive development of Frye’s thoughts about romance as a literary form. This new edition in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye series brings The Secular Scripture together with thirty shorter pieces pertaining to literary theory and criticism from the last fifteen years of Frye’s life.

Frye’s study illuminates the enduring attraction and deep human significance of the romance genre in all its forms. He provides a unique perspective on popular fiction and culture and shows how romance forms have, by their very structural and conventional features, an ability to address both specific social concerns and deep and fundamental human concerns that span time and place. In distinguishing popular from elite culture, Frye insists that they are both ultimately two aspects of the same “human compulsion to create in the face of chaos.” The additional late writings reflect Frye’s sense at the time that he was working “toward some kind of final statement,” which eventually saw the light of day, only months before his death, as Words with Power (1990).

Preface

Credits and Sources

Abbreviations

Introduction

  1. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance
    1. The Word and World of Man
    2. The Context of Romance
    3. Our Lady of Pain: Heroes and Heroines of Romance
    4. The Bottomless Dream: Themes of Descent
    5. Quis Hic Locus? Themes of Ascent
    6. The Recovery of Myth
  2. Romance as Masque
  3. Letter to the Editor of Parabola
  4. The Responsibilities of the Critic
  5. Comment on Peter Hughes’s Essay
  6. Literature, History, and Language
  7. On Translation
  8. Extracts from The Practical Imagination: Stories, Poems, Plays
  9. Vision and Cosmos
  10. Literature as a Critique of Pure Reason
  11. Approaching the Lyric
  12. The Survival of Eros in Poetry
  13. The Ouroboros
  14. Literary and Linguistic Scholarship in a Postliterate World
  15. The End of History
  16. Myth as the Matrix of Literature
  17. The KoinÉ of Myth: Myth as a Universally Intelligible Language
  18. The Symbol as a Medium of Exchange
  19. The Expanding World of Metaphor
  20. Extracts from The Harper Handbook to Literature
  21. Letter to the Editor of PMLA
  22. Lacan and the Full Word
  23. Literature and the Visual Arts
  24. The Journey as Metaphor
  25. Framework and Assumption
  26. Maps and Territories
  27. Epilogo
  28. Auguries of Experience
  29. Literary and Mechanical Models
  30. Literature as Therapy
  31. Response to Papers on “Northrop Frye and Eighteenth-Century Literature”

Notes

Emendations

Index

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