Northrop Frye is conceivably Canada's most celebrated literary theorist, but his role in the country's cultural evolution has perhaps been overlooked by later Canadian scholars in favour of his better-known literary criticism. This collection brings together all of the writings of Northrop Frye, both published and heretofore unpublished, on the subject of Canadian literature and culture. From his early book reviews of the 1930s and 1940s through his explorations of the patterns of Canadian literature in the fifties, to his cultural commentaries of the sixties, seventies, and eighties (including all his essays from The Bush Garden and Divisions on a Ground), Northrop Frye on Canada is vivid testimony to his position as an astute critic of his country's literature and a vital participant in its cultural evolution.

All of Frye's writings on Canadian literature and culture – essays, articles, reviews, and speeches – are published in their entirety and are accompanied by a detailed introduction and contextual headnotes to each piece. Gathered from more than fifty years of Frye's career, the collection shows Frye as a careful and caring critic of Canada, and is demonstrative of his importance as the cultural commentator on Canada.

Northrop Frye (1912-1991) was one of the twentieth century's most influential English scholars and literary critics. Northrop Frye was a professor in the Department of English at Victoria University in the University of Toronto from 1939 until his death. His works include Words with Power and Anatomy of Criticism.

Estate of Northrop Frye's profile page

Jean O'Grady served as the associate editor of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. She also worked for nine years as a post-doctoral fellow on The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, and is the author of the biography of Margaret Addison, the first dean of women at Victoria College.

Jean O'Grady's profile page

Professor of English at the University of Ottawa, David Staines specializes in medieval literature and culture and Canadian literature and culture. In the former, he has published Tennyson’s Camelot: The Idylls of the King and Its Medieval Sources, and translated The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes; in the latter, he published The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary Culture, The Forty-Ninth and Other Parallels: Contemporary Canadian Perspectives, and The Letters of Stephen Leacock. He has also edited volumes on Morley Callaghan, Stephen Leacock and Margaret Laurence, and co-edited volumes of the writings of Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan. A long-time friend of Carol Shields, he wrote Carol Shields: Cultural Context, a part of Library and Archives Canada’s Web exhibition Canadian Writers.

David Staines' profile page