The Bush Garden
Essays on the Canadian Imagination
- Publisher
- House of Anansi Press Inc
- Initial publish date
- Aug 2017
- Category
- Canadian, Criticism & Theory
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780887845727
- Publish Date
- Sep 1995
- List Price
- $24.95
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781487002664
- Publish Date
- Aug 2017
- List Price
- $14.95
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781487002671
- Publish Date
- Aug 2017
- List Price
- $14.95
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Description
Originally published in 1971,The Bush Garden features Northrop Frye’s timeless essays on Canadian literature and painting, and an introduction by bestselling author Lisa Moore.
In this cogent collection of essays written between 1943 and 1969, formidable literary critic and theorist Northrop Frye explores the Canadian imagination through the lens of the country’s artistic output: prose, poetry, and paintings. Frye offers insightful commentary on the works that shaped a “Canadian sensibility,” and includes a comprehensive survey of the landscape of Canadian poetry throughout the 1950s, including astute criticism of the work of E. J. Pratt, Robert Service, Irving Layton, and many others.
Written with clarity and precision,The Bush Garden is a significant cache of literary criticism that traces a pivotal moment in the country’s cultural history and the evolution of Frye’s thinking at various stages of his career. These essays are evidence of Frye’s brilliance, and cemented his reputation as Canada’s — and the world’s — foremost literary critic.
About the authors
Northrop Frye (1912-1991) was one of Canada's most distinguished men of letters. His first book, Fearful Symmetry, published in 1947, transformed the study of the poet William Blake, and over the next forty years he transformed the study of literature itself. Among his most influential books are Anatomy of Criticism (1957), The Educated Imagination (1963), The Bush Garden (1971), and The Great Code (1982). Northrop Frye on Shakespeare (1986) won the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction. A professor at the University of Toronto, Frye gained an international reputation for his wide-reaching critical vision. He lectured at universities around the world and received many awards and honours, including thirty-six honorary degrees.
Lisa Moore is the acclaimed author of the novels Caught, February, and Alligator. Caught was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize and is now a major CBC television series starring Allan Hawco. February won CBC’s Canada Reads competition, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and was named a New Yorker Best Book of the Year and a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book. Alligator was a finalist for the Scotia Bank Giller Prize, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canada and the Caribbean region), and was a national bestseller. Her story collection Open was a finalist for the Scotia Bank Giller Prize and a national bestseller. Her most recent work is a collection of short stories called Something for Everyone. Lisa lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
Excerpt: The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (by (author) Northrop Frye; introduction by Lisa Moore)
The question of Canadian identity, so far as it affects the creative imagination, is not a “Canadian” question at all, but a regional question. An environment turned outward towards the sea, like so much of Newfoundland, and one turned towards inland seas, like so much of the Maritimes, are an imaginative contrast: anyone who has been conditioned by one in his early years can hardly be conditioned by the other in the same way. Anyone brought up on the urban plain of Southern Ontario or the gentle pays farmland along the south shore of the St. Lawrence may become fascinated by the great sprawling wilderness of Northern Ontario or Ungava, may move their and live with its people and become accepted as one of them, but if he paints or writes about it he will paint or write as an imaginative foreigner. And what can there be in common between an imagination nurtured on the prairies, where it is a centre of consciousness diffusing itself over a vast flat expanse stretching to a remote horizon, and one nurtured in British Columbia, where it is in the midst of gigantic trees and mountains leaping into the sky all around it, and obliterating the horizon everywhere?
Editorial Reviews
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
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
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
