Northrop Frye and Others: Twelve Writers Who Helped Shape His Thinking

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 Denham draws especially on Frye’s notebooks and other previously unpublished texts, now available in the Collected Works of Frye.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, Soren 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.