Anatomy, Confession, “Book Literature”: Northrop Frye between Late Antiquity and Early Modernity

Mark Vessey, University of British Columbia

In the preface to his Northrop Frye: Anatomy of his Criticism (1990), the eminent Canadian scholar of Edmund Spenser’s poetry, A. C. Hamilton, endorsed Yale critic Geoffrey Hartman’s opinion that, by the end of the 1970s, an institution of criticism originating with Renaissance humanism was coming to an end. A study of Frye’s oeuvre, Hamilton proposed (and then showed), could provide a useful perspective on that critical tradition and on the literary tradition associated with the Reformation in England, “not only because [Frye’s] criticism [was] central within [those] traditions, which culminated in the 1950s, but also because it initiate[d] contemporary criticism.” So how do things look now, half a biblical life-span after Frye’s death, on the other side of the poststructuralist and New Historicist revolutions, and in a climate of enthusiasm for postcritical approaches to the teaching of literature? Can we still take a view of Frye, in his time, that would be constructive for early modern literary studies in ours? A striking feature of the academic humanities since the 1950s has been the emergence of a well-defined and now intensively cultivated field of “late antique” studies. (The University of Toronto has played a leading role in that development.) The project of this lecture is to add a dimension to our history of the genesis and reception of Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism by setting them in relation to the late modern(ist) Rise of Late Antiquity, and to suggest how such perspectival updating might affect the discussions stirred up among Miltonists and other specialists of early modern British literature by Victoria Kahn’s Clarendon Lectures on The Trouble with Literature (2020), which open with a reminiscence of a seminar led by Geoffrey Hartman at Yale in the 1970s, and in which Frye’s name never appears.

Speaker Bio:

Mark Vessey studied English at Cambridge, Patristics in Paris, and Ancient History at Oxford. He was a member of the Department of English at the University of British Columbia from 1989 until his retirement in 2025, and Principal of Green College at UBC between 2008 and 2023. His research has been mainly in the fields of literary history and theory, history of the book, and history of scholarship, with a predilection for Latin writers of late antiquity (especially Jerome and Augustine) and Erasmus. Publications include Latin Christian Writers in Late Antiquity and Their Texts (2005), the Blackwell Companion to Augustine (2012, as editor) and, most recently, Erasmus on Literature (2021, as editor) and chapters on “Literature and the Church in the Post-Constantinian Empire” and “The Critical Opportunity of Later Latin Literature” for the Cambridge History of Later Latin Literature (2026). A selection of his articles, provisionally entitled Patristics as Literary History / History of the Book: Re-reading Christian Writers from Latin Late Antiquity is in preparation for the series Receptio Patristica: Studies in the Afterlife of Early Christian Texts and Writers.