“The greatness of Frye,” writes Fredric Jameson, “and the radical difference between his work and that of the great bulk of garden-variety myth criticism, lies in his willingness to raise the issue of community and to draw basic, essentially social, interpretive consequences from the nature of religion as collective representation.” In the years since the height of Canadian literary critic and theorist Northrop Frye’s influence, the category of religion has received renewed scholarly attention in early modern literary, artistic, and historical studies. This scholarship has illuminated the formative role of religion on the aesthetic, economic, and political transformations associated with modernity and therefore affords a new opportunity to reconsider Frye’s religiously inflected criticism and its critiques. Do the transformations of modernity constitute a “radical break,” as for Jameson, that makes impossible the trans-historical project of Frye’s “archetypal criticism”? What is the relationship between the synthetic or universalizing ambition of Frye’s critical project and the material, historical, and cultural particularities that attend literary production and criticism? How do these particularities inflect both Frye’s critical project and our own critical, scholarly, and pedagogical practices in the modern Canadian university?
The literature, history, and afterlife of the Renaissance and Reformation were always at the centre of Frye’s thought. His first book, Fearful Symmetry, reads William Blake as inheriting and extending the visionary traditions that emerged out of the 16th and 17th centuries. His most famous and influential book, The Anatomy of Criticism, was originally conceived as an introduction to Spenser’s Faerie Queene. His writings on Shakespeare and Milton have left a profound mark on the scholarship in their respective fields. Making use of the E.J. Pratt Library’s Northrop Frye Collection, our working group will reconsider this imaginative criticism within the horizon of the University of Toronto and Canadian literary culture. Our focus will be on his Renaissance criticism, his participation in the legacy of the radical Reformation, and his place both within a wider Canadian literary culture and at the University of Toronto.
The working group will consist of monthly afternoon sessions based on selected readings. These will culminate in a final one-day conference on May 7, 2026. We will begin by reading his recuperation of fourfold allegorical exegesis alongside Jameson’s response to it in The Political Unconscious. Subsequent meetings will be planned based on the interests of the group.
Our first meeting will be on Monday, October 20, 4–5:30, in Pratt 304 (across the hall from the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies library, on the third floor of E.J. Pratt Library).
All interested—irrespective of discipline or previous experience with Frye—are warmly encouraged to join.
Northrop Frye’s Renaissance will be hosting a conference on May 7th, 2026, with featured keynote Mark Vessey (University of British Columbia). The title of his paper is “Anatomy, Confession and ‘book literature; Northrop Frye’s Late Antiquity”. We hope to see you there.
Click here for more information about the conference.
Please contact Matthew Church at [email protected] to become part of our mailing list. Readings will be distributed electronically in advance of our first meeting.
