Northrop Frye's Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings

Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings, the thirteenth and final volume of previously unpublished writings by the famous literary critic, retrieves a number of materials from the Frye archives – holograph notebooks, typed notes, and typescripts – that have been largely hidden until now. Among these are autobiographical reflections, short stories, an unfinished novel, and writings on a wide range of topics from Canadian culture to religion.

Some of the contents of this volume, Frye’s early fiction efforts, for example, will come as a surprise to those primarily acquainted with his published criticism. All of his fables and dialogues are included here, as are a half-dozen sets of notes in which he speculates on fictional forms that he dreams of one day writing. These and the other pieces in this miscellany offer further evidence of Frye’s fertile mind, quick wit, expansive imagination, and verbal power. Frye always claimed that the process of writing for him was a search for proper formulas through which to communicate. The material in this volume, which seldom fails to instruct and delight, discloses the process of that search.