Northrop Frye's Lectures

Book excerpt: The great Canadian literary critic and humanist Northrop Frye taught at Victoria College, University of Toronto, for fifty-three years. Remembering Northrop Frye (2011) brought together letters from eighty-nine of Frye’s students and friends in which they recorded their recollections of him as a teacher during the 1940s and 1950s. However, these students provided very few accounts of what Frye actually said in the classroom. Outside of the video recordings of Frye’s course in the English Bible, this book, a transcription of fifteen sets of notes taken by Northrop Frye’s students in the late 1940s and early 1950s, is the only available extended record of the content of Frye’s courses. For all those who wish that they could have sat in one or more of Frye’s classes, the present collection of notes will at least partially fulfill that wish. One can now attend, as it were, fifteen of Frye’s classes without having to pay tuition.