Presented here is a selection from the professional and personal correspondence of Northrop Frye, one of the preeminent literary critics of the last century. With frank and accessible appraisals, the letters reveal Frye's attitudes toward scores of topics: the value of James Bond thrillers, the gap between faith and reason, surrealism, hippies, Milton's imagery, comparative literature, political hysteria in the U.S., the nature of the educated imagination, anarchism, the teaching of religion in the university, the Proteus myth, the distinction between subjects and themes, the connection between Nietzsche and Yeats, the difference between cliche and aphorism, the fussy rules of copy editors, and scores of other issues.

Because Charles Wright occupies a large space in the world of contemporary American poetry, it is only natural that his readers over the years have wanted to engage him in conversation and discover more about his career and inspirations. Though private and self-effacing, Wright has always been generous in acceding to requests for interviews. In this collection of richly detailed interviews conducted between 1979 and 2006, Wright replies to queries about the beginning of his poetic career in Italy, his experiences at the University of Iowa, and the American and European influences on his work.The questions posed by the interviewers are almost infinitely varied, ranging from contemporary poets he admires to the influence of country music on his works. The interviewers also ask about numerous formal matters, including his lineation and rhythmic phrasing, the structure of his trilogies, his use of syllabics, and the development of his characteristic style. The book is fully indexed, and contains an extensive bibliography of writings by and about Wright.

This book brings together letters from 89 of Northrop Frye's students, friends, and acquaintances in which they record their recollections of him as a teacher and a person during the 1940s and 1950s. A number of the correspondents also provide their impressions of Victoria College at the time, where Frye taught for more than 50 years. The letters provide insights into Frye as a teacher that are not elsewhere available, and reveal a consistent portrait of an intellectually superlative, generous, and thoughtful man.

This companion covers Charles Wright's first two trilogies, ""Country Music"" (1982) and ""The World of the Ten Thousand Things"" (1990), providing biographical details, information on Wright's sources and influences, and historical notes. It pays special attention to the way that Wright's poems work together and the links that are formed between them. While each poem is given its own commentary, the author argues that they work together in a concentrated whole to document a man's spiritual journey.

This work offers a complete reader's guide and handbook to the late poetry of author Charles Wright. It begins with a study of the poems in ""Chickamauga"" (1995), the earliest of which were published in the late 1980s, and continues through the seven volumes that followed: ""Black Zodiac"" (1997), ""Appalachia"" (1998), ""North American Bear"" (1999), ""A Short History of the Shadow"" (2002), ""Buffalo Yoga"" (2004), ""Scar Tissue"" (2006), and ""Littlefoot"" (2007). The author includes an annotated commentary for each of the 230 poems covered in the work, providing background information such as perceived influences, parallels to other poets, historical explanations, and biographical details.

Canadian literary theorist Northrop Frye reshaped literary studies with his 1957 book, Anatomy of Criticism. During his long career, Frye earned widespread recognition and honors for his contributions to cultural and social critique. This biographical and bibliographic guide to Frye and his work includes a chronology, a catalog of primary and secondary materials, a list of conferences devoted to him, annotations in books in his personal library, his honorary degrees, dissertations under his direction, the application of his criticism in other disciplines, and his role in the Bodley Club as an Oxford student. Explorations of books and journals dedicated to his work and of the volumes in his Collected Works complete this exhaustive compilation on one of the most influential literary critics of the 20th century.

'Frye was a person of uncommon gifts, and very little that came from his pen is without interest.' So writes Robert Denham in his introduction to this unique collection of twenty-two papers written by Northrop Frye during his student years. Made public only after Frye's death in 1991, all but one of the essays are published here for the first time.

The majority of these papers were written for courses at Emmanuel College, the theology school of Victoria College at the University of Toronto. Essays such as 'The Concept of Sacrifice, ' 'The Fertility Cults, ' and 'The Jewish Background of the New Testament' reveal the links between Frye's early research in theology and the form and content of his later criticism. It is clear that even as a theology student Frye's first impulse was always that of the cultural critic. The papers on Calvin, Eliot, Chaucer, Wyndham Lewis, and on the forms of prose fiction show Frye as precociously witty, rigorous, and incisive - a gifted writer who clearly found his voice before his last undergraduate year.

David Lodge wrote in the New Statesman: 'There are not many critics whose twenty-year-old book reviews one can read with pleasure and instruction, but Frye is an exception to most rules.' Northrop Frye's student essays provide pleasure and instruction through their comments on the Augustinian view of history, on beauty, truth, and goodness, on literary symbolism and tradition.

"Northrop Frye's Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings," the thirteenth and final volume of previously unpublished writings by the famous literary critic, retrieves a number of materials from the Frye archives - holograph notebooks, typed notes, and typescripts - that have been largely hidden until now. Among these are autobiographical reflections, short stories, an unfinished novel, and writings on a wide range of topics from Canadian culture to religion.

Some of the contents of this volume, Frye's early fiction efforts, for example, will come as a surprise to those primarily acquainted with his published criticism. All of his fables and dialogues are included here, as are a half-dozen sets of notes in which he speculates on fictional forms that he dreams of one day writing. These and the other pieces in this miscellany offer further evidence of Frye's fertile mind, quick wit, expansive imagination, and verbal power. Frye always claimed that the process of writing for him was a search for proper formulas through which to communicate. The material in this volume, which seldom fails to instruct and delight, discloses the process of that search.

An inveterate notebook keeper, Northrop Frye continually jotted down his ideas and thoughts as he worked through the complex schemes of his criticism. Volumes 5 and 6 of the Collected Works are the notebooks that he kept while writing his two final books, "Words with Power" and "The Double Vision." They provide a record of what he was reading and thinking as he struggled with the implications of those projects. In a sense they are the workshops out of which the books were constructed.

While focusing on the works-in-progress, the 3684 entries presented here range over diverse territory, never failing to surprise, delight, and provoke. In these notebooks, for instance, we find comments triggered by a detective story Frye is reading, a lecture he has to prepare, a glance at the books on his shelves, a quotation he remembers, a letter received, or the memory of a trip. In many respects, the notebooks reveal a Frye who is quite different from the critic who made his reputation with "Fearful Symmetry" and "Anatomy of Criticism," displaying aspects of his personality and thought that are not apparent in his books and essays. The notebooks show us the unbuttoned Frye, a complex man capable of both spiritual transcendence and hard-headed pragmatism. Here, for instance, his criticism of Catholicism is far more acerbic than in anything he published. Likewise, his rejection of both Marxist and feminist ideology is far more pointed than elsewhere.

These two volumes include seven of Frye's handwritten notebooks and five collections of his typed notebooks - all previously unpublished. The material is the record of an extraordinary intellectual odyssey, an odyssey that is, at its base, deeply spiritual.

Helen Kemp Frye (1910-1986) was an accomplished artist and musician, and she was also the wife of the distinguished Canadian literary critic, Northrop Frye. During the 1940s and 1950s, she played an important role in art education, particularly with the programs at the Art Gallery of Toronto, and even more particularly with art education for children. Her writings on art, collected in this volume, give voice to a very creative individual whose contributions to the cultural life of Ontario are in danger of being forgotten.