Eternal Act Of Creation Essays 1979 1990

"... twelve essays in which this visionary literary critic speaks specifically to the eternal act of creation, addressing the incessant need for literary revisioning." --Studies in Religion

These essays, four of which are published here for the first time, reveal one of the most extraordinary minds of our time engaging a wide range of literary, cultural, and religious issues. Frye gave these addresses during the last decade of his life, and they reveal this distinguished critic speaking with wit and wisdom about the permanent forms of human civilization and engaging in the eternal act of creation.

This volume brings together twelve addresses that Frye gave during the last decade of his life. These essays reveal one of the most extraordinary minds of our time engaging a wide range of literary, cultural, and religious issues.

NORTHROP FRYE was University Professor at the University of Toronto, where he taught from 1939 until his death in 1991. Among his thirty books are Fearful Symmetry; Anatomy of Criticism; The Educated Imagination; The Great Code; Words with Power; Reading the World; Spiritus Mundi; The Critical Path; The Double Vision; and Myth and Metaphor. ROBERT D. DENHAM is John P. Fishwick Professor of English at Roanoke College.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I

Auguries of Experience

Literary and Mechanical Models

Literature as Therapy

II

Repetitions of Jacob's Dream

The Bride from the Strange Land

Blake's Biblical Illustrations

III

Shakespeare's The Tempest

Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility

Henry James and the Comedy of the Occult

Approaching the Lyric

IV

Criticism and Environment

Harold Innis: The Strategy of Culture

Levels of Cultural Identity

Index