Northrop Frye and Others

This book, based on extensive archival and historical work, identifies and brings to light additional and littlerecognized intellectual influences on Frye, and analyzes how they informed his thought. These are variously
major thinkers, sets of texts, and intellectual traditions: the Mahayana Sutras, Machiavelli, Rabelais, Boehme, Hegel, Coleridge, Carlyle, Mill, Jane Ellen Harrison and Elizabeth Fraser.

In each chapter, dedicated to Frye’s connection to a specific influence, Denham describes how Frye became acquainted with each, and how he interpreted and adapted certain ideas from them to help work out his own conceptual systems. Denham offers insights on Frye’s relationship with his historical and intellectual contexts, provides valuable additional context for understanding the work of one of the 20th century’s leading scholars of literature and culture.

Includes over 20 photos, tables and figures, as well as a chapter on Frye’s personal relationship with Elizabeth Fraser.

Table of contents
Cover	1
Title Page	4
Copyright	5
Contents	10
Introduction	14
Abbreviations and Short Titles	28
1: Frye and the Mahayana Sutras	32
Frye and the East	32
The Sutras	34
The Lankavatara Sutra	37
The Avatamsaka Sutra	39
The Translation of Ideas	40
Holism and Interpenetration	41
The Avatamsaka Sutra Revisited	45
The Incarnation and Interpenetration	48
2: Frye and Niccolò Machiavelli	54
“Machiavellian” in English Renaissance Drama	54
Virtù	56
Hypocrisy and Personhood	58
Machiavelli, Shakespeare, and Hypocrisy Upward	60
3: Frye and François Rabelais	64
Gargantua and Pantagruel as an Anatomy	64
Rhythm	67
Giantism and Allegory	70
The Seattle Illumination and the Oracle of the Bottle	73
Creative Descent	78
4: Frye and Jacob Boehme	80
Blake and Boehme	80
The Deification of the Void	83
Nothing: Boehme, Eckhart, and The Cloud of Unknowing	85
Schematic Thinking and the Kabbalah	88
Numbers and Synchronicity	99
Coincidentia Oppositorum	108
5: Frye and G. W. F. Hegel	114
Appropriating Hegel as a Student	115
Dialectic	120
The Hegelian Aufhebung	122
Aufhebung at Work	124
Ladder	127
Levels of Meaning	130
6: Frye and Samuel Taylor Coleridge	136
Logos and the One Big Book	137
The Imagination	142
Interpenetration	146
Aphorism	148
7: Frye and Thomas Carlyle	152
The Diagrammatic Basis of Thought	154
Work	157
The Hero and Heroism	161
Symbolism	165
8: Frye and John Stuart Mill	170
Liberty	172
Liberalism	174
Coda: The Opposition	175
9: Frye and Jane Ellen Harrison	178
Frye’s Reading of the Cambridge Classicists	178
The Cambridge School and the Context of Archetypal Criticism	182
Dromena: Things Done	186
Eniautos Daimon	188
From Fluttering Female to Wise Woman	190
10: Frye and Elizabeth Fraser	192
Elizabeth Fraser’s Letters to Northrop Frye	202
Notes	228
Works Cited	254
Index	264

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