Eminent Northrop Frye scholar Robert D. Denham explores the connection between Frye and twelve writers who influenced his thinking but about whom he didn’t write anything expansive. Denham draws especially on Frye’s notebooks and other previously unpublished texts, now available in the Collected Works of Frye. Such varied thinkers as Aristotle, Lewis Carroll, Søren Kierkegaard, and Paul Tillich emerge as important figures in defining Frye’s cross-disciplinary interests. Eventually, the twelve “Others” of the title come to represent a space occupied by writers whose interests paralleled Frye’s and helped to establish his own critical universe.
Ce livre est publié en anglais.

Robert D. Denham is John P. Fishwick Professor of English, Emeritus, at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. Before that he was Professor of English and Chair of the department at Emory & Henry College, and in the mid-1980s he served as Director of English Programs and Director of the Association of Departments of English for the Modern Language Association in New York City. Denham received his M.A. in religion and art and his Ph.D. in English (with honors) from the University of Chicago. He has devoted much of his professional life to writing about Northrop Frye and editing his work.

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The thing I most wanted to write to you about was how blown away I am by Northrop Frye and Others. I’m teaching four courses and am pressed for time, and had already started another book, so I told myself I’d just read the Introduction. But I couldn’t put it down and am now in the middle of the chapter on Joaquim of Floris. This book is major Frye criticism, not a rehashing of minor points about Frye: it’s not a mopping-up operation but rather breaks new ground. That is certainly true of the Aristotle and Longinus chapters. I think Denham is utterly persuasive about Frye’s switch of allegiance in the second half of his life: it accounts for so much, not only in his writing on the Bible but in, for example, his transformed view of Romanticism....The work is not just a reference work, but I’ll add that it can be used as one even by someone as versed in Frye and his sources as I am.

Michael Dolzani