Biography of Northrop Fyre

NORTHROP FYRE

 (1912–1991)

INTRODUCTION

Northrop Frye was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.

FAMILY

Herman Northrop Frye was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec on July 14, 1912. Frye was raised in Moncton, New Brunswick as the third child of Herman Edward Frye and of Catherine Maud Howard. He had an elder brother and a sister named Howard and Vera respectively. The scientist Alma Howard was his first cousin.

EDUCATION

Frye studied for his undergraduate degree at Victoria College, University of Toronto where he edited the college literary journal, Acta Victoriana. He then studied theology at Emmanuel College (part of Victoria College). After a brief stint as student minister in Saskatchewan, he was ordained as a minister of the United Church of Canada. He then received a scholarship to do postgraduate work at Merton College, Oxford. He returned to Canada in 1939 and taught at Victoria College, University of Toronto. Frye became chairman of the English department there in 1952 and served as principal (1959–67) and chancellor (1978–91) of the college. He gave lectures and taught throughout the United States and Great Britain and around the world.

CONTRIBUTIONS

Frye rose to international prominence as a result of his first book, Fearful Symmetry, published in 1947. Until then, the prophetic poetry of William Blake had long been poorly understood, and considered by some to be delusional ramblings. Frye found in it a system of metaphor derived from Paradise Lost and the Bible. His study of Blake's poetry was a major contribution to the subject. Moreover, Frye outlined an innovative manner of studying literature that was too deeply influence the study of literature in general. He was a major influence on Harold Bloom, Margaret Atwood, and others.

Anatomy of Criticism  (1957), a book that sought to provide a structural framework for the study of literature through an analysis of its various modes, symbols, myths, images, and genres. The Anatomy, heralded for a generation as a twentieth-century Poetics, had a large following in the 1960s and 1970s, and twenty years after its publication it was the most frequently cited book in the arts and humanities by a writer born in the twentieth century. Seventeen translations of the Anatomy into thirteen languages (as of 2003) attest to its international standing. His work, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature is  a monumental and systematic study of the myths, language, metaphor and symbols of the Hebrew-Christian Bible, published in 1982. Mr. Frye had also written extensively on the works of William Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot. He argued in a 1963 book, The Well-Tempered Critic, that literary criticism was a primary means "to produce out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in." In later works Frye supplemented the examination of archetype and genre with practical criticism. His concept of literature was that of a self-contained total history, rather than a linear progression through time, and he saw the Bible, more than any other source, as the body of myth that shaped Western literature.

ACHIEVEMENTS

Frye engaged in cultural and social criticism and was the recipient of some 39 honorary degrees. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1951 and awarded the Royal Society's Lorne Pierce Medal in 1958 and its Pierre Chauveau Medal in 1970. He won the Canada Council Molson Prize in 1971, and the Royal Bank Award in 1978. In 1987 he received the Governor General's Literary Award and the Toronto Arts Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2000, he was honoured by the government of Canada with his image on a postage stamp. An international literary festival The Frye Festival, named in Frye's honour, takes place every April in Moncton, New Brunswick. The Northrop Frye Centre, part of Victoria College at the University of Toronto and Northrop Frye School in Moncton were named in his honour. Frye was named a National Historic Person in 2018.
Frye married Helen Kemp, an educator, editor and artist, in 1937. She died in Australia while accompanying Frye on a lecture tour. Two years after her death in 1986, he married Elizabeth Brown.

SELECTED WORKS

Fearful Symmetry, Anatomy of Criticism, The Educated Imagination, Fables of Identity, The Modern Century, A Study of English Romanticism, The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination, The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism, Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society, Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature: A Collection of Review Essays, Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays.