Northrop Frye

Victoria University Library owns a comprehensive collection of Northrop Frye’s published work, literary manuscripts, correspondence, personal and professional writings, photographs and audiovisual materials. In 1967, the Library acquired the manuscripts of the Well-Tempered Critic and Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy. More materials came into the Collection following Northrop Frye’s death in 1991. The Collection is described in a Finding Aid (see below), a published Guide to the Northrop Frye Papers (1993) and in a list of books (see below) from Northrop Frye’s personal library with Frye’s annotations. These items form the basis for the Collected Works editorial project at the Northrop Frye Centre in Victoria University. The Library continues to collect Frye’s works in translation, new Frye criticism, new editions of Frye’s texts, and associated audiovisual items.

Victoria University Library holds several collections relating to the life and work of Northrop Frye. In addition to the archival records in the Northrop Frye fonds, there are publications written by Frye, a collection of monographs annotated by Frye, and a collection of book inserts. See below for more information about these three collections and links to access them:

University of Toronto Catalogue:
Contains published items by and about Frye held in the entire University of Toronto Libraries, including items in the Frye and General collections at Victoria University Library.

Guide to the Northrop Frye Papers:
A detailed finding aid for manuscript and audiovisual materials contained in the Northrop Frye fonds. A printed index to the finding aid is available in the Library.

List of Works Annotated by Frye:
Contains over 2000 monographs annotated by Frye. Each annotated book has been catalogued in the University of Toronto Library Catalogue.

Northrop Frye Insert Collection:
An inventory of inserts in various formats that were found between the pages of the books in Northrop Frye's collection of annotated works.

Herman Northrop Frye (1912–1991) was an internationally recognized literary scholar and academic. He was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, the son of Herman Edward Frye and Catherine Maud Howard. He married Helen Kemp in 1937. Two years after her death in 1986 he married Elizabeth Brown. He died in Toronto, Ontario.

Frye spent his childhood in Quebec and New Brunswick. His primary and secondary education in Moncton, New Brunswick, was followed by a business training-course. In 1929 he entered Victoria College, Victoria University at the University of Toronto. He graduated in 1933 in the Honour Course in Philosophy and English. He then studied theology at Emmanuel College, Victoria University, and was ordained to Ministry of the United Church of Canada in 1936. He attended Merton College, Oxford, England from 1936 to 1937 and from 1938 to 1939. He graduated with first class honours in the English School and received an Oxford M.A. in 1940.

In 1939 Frye joined the Department of English at Victoria College as a Lecturer. He became Assistant Professor in 1942, Associate Professor in 1946, Professor in 1947, Chairman of the Department of English at Victoria College in 1952, and Principal of Victoria College in 1959. In 1967 he retired as Principal and became University Professor at the University of Toronto. He continued to teach as Professor of English at Victoria College. From 1978 until his death he was Chancellor of Victoria University.

Frye lectured at over one hundred universities in Canada, the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, Japan, New Zealand, Italy, Israel, Australia and the former Soviet Union. He taught a full term or a summer session at Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Indiana, Washington, British Columbia, Cornell, Berkeley and Oxford. He gave many special lectures for endowed lecture series. During his career he received numerous awards and honourary degrees, including Companion of the Order of Canada (1972), the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction for Northrop Frye on Shakespeare (1987) and the Mondello Prize (1990) in Italy for his lifetime dedication to literature.

Frye edited fifteen books, contributed essays and chapters to over sixty others and published over one hundred articles and reviews, including: Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947), Anatomy of Criticism (1957), The Well-Tempered Critic (1963), The Educated Imagination (1963), T.S. Eliot (1963), Fables of Identity (1963), A Natural Perspective (1965), The Return of Eden (1965), Fools of Time (1967), The Modern Century (1967), A Study of English Romanticism (1968), The Stubborn Structure (1970), The Bush Garden (1971), The Critical Path (1971), The Secular Scripture (1976), Spiritus Mundi (1976), Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature (1978), Creation and Recreation (1980), The Great Code (1982), Divisions on a ground (1982), The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare’s Comedies (1983), Northrop Frye on Shakespeare (1986), No Uncertain Sounds (1988), Northrop Frye on Education (1988), Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974–1988 (1990), Words with Power (1990), Reading the World-Selected Writings, 1935–1976 (1990), The Double Vision (1991), and A World in Grain and Sand: Twenty-two interviews with Northrop Frye (1991).