Northrop Frye was one of our most distinguished and respected authorities on English literature. Prior to his death in 1991, he was principal and chancellor of Victoria College, University of Toronto, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. LISA MOORE is the acclaimed author of the novels Caught, February, and Alligator; the story collections Open and Something for Everyone; and the young-adult novel Flannery. Her books have won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and CBC’s Canada Reads, been finalists for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Moore is also the co-librettist, along with Laura Kaminsky, of the opera February, based on her novel of the same name. She lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
Any publication by Northrop Frye is an important literary event;
this one is of the highest importance to Canadian literature. Here
Frye has collected all the essays he believes to be of permanent
value on Canadian writing and painting. His tremendous intelligence
and erudition is thus focused on a much smaller field of vision
than it normally is. Tethered in its own backyard, as it were, this
formidable creature can be observed more closely than it can be
when it roams the far reaches of the literary world.
*Globe and Mail*
Frye’s handiwork is equivalent to most everyone’s masterwork. Nor
can I imagine a more perceptive book being written about the
Canadian poetic imagination. Northrop Frye resembles nobody so much
as a poet Midas — everything he touches turns into poetic
metaphor.
*Toronto Star*
These reviews are still relevant, partly because Frye is such a
good critic and partly because his reviews embraced such a wide
range of poetry that, perhaps especially in retrospect, they
provide a fascinating sense of process through which a literature
develops . . . We can respond to the immediate perceptions of a
subtle and literate critical mind.
*Maclean’s*
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Bush Garden is that it
reveals Northrop Frye as a practical critic. He does not try to fit
everything he reads into preconceived theories, and the range of
his sympathies is admirably wide. And he succeeds in demonstrating
the importance for Canadian writers of their Canadian
forebears.
*CBC Anthology*
Ask a Question About this Product More... |