Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts

Northrop Frye (1912-1991) was one of the twentieth century's most influential English scholars and literary critics. Northrop Frye was a professor in the Department of English at Victoria University in the University of Toronto from 1939 until his death. His works include Words with Power and Anatomy of Criticism.

Northrop Frye's expansive and influential lectures on the literary symbolism of the Bible given during 1981-2 are arguably his best and most accessible works on the Bible. This thirteenth volume in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye gathers together these lectures and Frye's notebooks on the Bible, Dante, and Eastern religion. The eleven holograph notebooks and the twenty-four lectures here transcribed present new insights into Northrop Frye, the man, his genius, his methods, and his thought, and complement the two other published editions of Frye's notebooks in this series, The Late Notebooks (2000) and The 'Third Book' Notebooks (2002). The notebook material comes mostly from the 1970s when Frye was at work on the first of his books on the Bible, The Great Code, but also includes one notebook from the 1940s, another from the 1960s which is devoted to Frye's reading of Dante's Purgatorio and the first ten cantos of the Paradiso, and another from the 1980s when Frye was at work on his second book on the Bible, Words with Power. Fully annotated, with endnotes to each piece and a comprehensive foreword, this latest volume in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye series will be an invaluable addition to any scholar's library.