A World in a Grain of Sand is a collection of twenty-two interviews with Northrop Frye from the early 1960s through the 1980s. Frye responds to a wide range of questions about the media, education, religion, literary theory, language, music, and literature itself - from Plato and the Bible to Milton, Blake, Shelley, and Melville. Half of the interviews, transcribed from tape recordings, are published here for the first time. Throughout the collection the reader will discover a richly stored mind, often expressing itself in an ironic mode, arguing for the value of both the liberal tradition and the visionary imagination. What emerges finally from the interviews is Frye’s own broad vision of the social function of words.