This collection of writings brings together Northrop Frye's large body of work on Shakespeare and other Renaissance writers (with the exception of Milton, who is featured in other volumes), and includes major articles, introductions, public lectures, and four previously published books. Spanning forty years of Frye's career as a university professor and literary critic, these insightful analyses not only reveal the author's formidable intellect but also offer the reader a transformative experience of creative imagination. With extensive annotation and an in-depth critical introduction, the volume demonstrates Frye's wide-ranging knowledge of Renaissance culture and its pivotal significance in his work, his impact on Renaissance criticism and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, and his continuing importance as a literary theorist. Troni V. Grande is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Regina. Garry Sherbert is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Regina.

This collection of Northrop Frye's writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance spans forty years of his career as a university teacher, public critic, and major theorist of literature and its cultural functions. Extensive annotations and an in-depth critical introduction demonstrate Frye's wide-ranging knowledge of Renaissance culture, the pivotal place of the Renaissance in his oeuvre, his impact on Renaissance criticism and on the Stratford Festival, and his continuing importance as a literary theorist. This volume brings together Frye's extensive writings on Shakespeare and other Renaissance writers (excluding Milton, who is featured in other volumes), and includes major articles, introductions, public lectures, and four previously published books on Shakespeare. Frye's insightful analyses offer not just a formidable knowledge of Renaissance culture but also a transformative experience, moving the reader imaginatively towards an experience of created reality.

Slings & Arrows, starring Susan Coyne, Paul Gross, Don McKellar, and Mark McKinney as members of the New Burbage Theatre Festival, was heralded by television critics as one of the best shows ever produced and one of the finest depictions of life in classical theatre. Shakespeare scholars, however, have been ambivalent about the series, at times even hostile. In Shakespeare and the World of “Slings & Arrows” Gary Kuchar situates the three-season series in its cultural and intellectual contexts. More than a roman à clef about Canada’s Stratford Festival, he shows, it is a privileged window onto major debates within Shakespeare studies and a drama that raises vital questions about the role of the arts in society. Kuchar reads the television show – ever fluctuating between faith and doubt in the power of drama – as an allegory of Peter Brook’s widely renowned account of modern theatre, The Empty Space, mirroring Brook’s distinction between holy theatre, a quasi-sacred vocation, and deadly theatre, a momentary entertainment. Combining contextualized interpretations of the series with subtle formalist readings, Kuchar explains how Slings & Arrows participates in a broader recuperation of humanist approaches to Shakespeare in contemporary scholarship. The result is a demonstration of how and why Shakespeare continues to provide not just entertainment, but equipment for living.

Here is a specialized dictionary of quotations based on the thoughts and writings of a single person. It is evidence that there is a Canadian writer of whom it may be said that we as his readers can grow up inside his work "without ever being aware of a circumference."

More than fifty years after the publication of Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye remains one of Canada's most influential intellectuals. This reappraisal reasserts the relevance of his work to the study of literature and illuminates its fruitful intersection with a variety of other fields, including film, cultural studies, linguistics, and feminism. Many of the contributors draw upon the early essays, correspondence, and diaries recently published as part of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye series, in order to explore the development of his extraordinary intellectual range and the implications of his imaginative syntheses. They refute postmodernist arguments that Frye's literary criticism is obsolete and propose his wide-ranging and non-linear ways of thinking as a model for twenty-first century readers searching for innovative ways of understanding literature and its relevance to contiguous disciplines. The volume provides an in-depth examination of Frye's work on a range of literary questions, periods, and genres, as well as a consideration of his contributions to literary theory, philosophy, and theology. The portrait that emerges is that of a writer who still has much to offer those interested in literature and the ways it represents and transforms our world. The book's overall argument is that Frye's case for the centrality of the imagination has never been more important where understanding history, reconciling science and culture, or reconceptualizing social change is concerned.

The widespread opinion is that Northrop Frye’s influence reached its zenith in the 1960s and 1970s, after which point he became obsolete, his work buried in obscurity. This almost universal opinion is summed up in Terry Eagleton’s 1983 rhetorical question, "Who now reads Frye?" In The Reception of Northrop Frye, Robert D. Denham catalogues what has been written about Frye – books, articles, translations, dissertations and theses, and reviews – in order to demonstrate that the attention Frye’s work has received from the beginning has progressed at a geomantic rate. Denham also explores what we can discover once we have a fairly complete record of Frye’s reception in front of us – such as Hayden White’s theory of emplotments applied to historical writing and Byron Almén’s theory of musical narrative. The sheer quantity of what has been written about Frye reveals that the only valid response to Eagleton’s rhetorical question is "a very large and growing number," the growth being not incremental but exponential.

Myth criticism flourished in the mid-twentieth century under the powerful influence of Canadian thinker Northrop Frye. It asserted the need to identify common, unifying patterns in literature, arts, and religion. Although it was eclipsed by postmodern theories that asserted difference and conflict, those theories proved incapable of inspiring solidarity or guiding social action. The Productions of Time argues for a return to myth criticism in order to refine and extend its vision. With the aim of rehabilitating myth criticism for our time, Michael Dolzani sketches an anatomy of the imagination as demonstrated in the total body of its productions, including literature, mythology, the arts, popular culture, and religious and political texts. Dolzani situates a vast panoply of images, character types, plot structures, themes, and genres to better understand their purposes, their recurrences across broad spans of history, and their interrelations. Illustrating the relationship between mythology and history, The Productions of Time proposes a symbolic language as a way of enabling dialogue across ideological and individual differences. Arguing for the ethical and intellectual necessity of conceiving a unifying pattern that transcends differences, The Productions of Time demonstrates that imagination is part of the human inheritance, common to all, not just to poets and mystics.

Describes the geography, plants and animals, history, economy, language, religions, culture, and people of the People's Republic of China, home of one of the world's oldest continuous civilizations.

Explores the value and uses of literature in our time. Dr. Frye offers ideas for the teaching of literature at lower school levels, designed both to promote an early interest and to lead the student to the knowledge and experience found in the study of literature.