Creation and Recreation

by Northrop Frye

Originally delivered as the 1980 Larkin-Stuart Lectures, this book provides an intriguing and provocative insight into the notion of creation and of the relationship in creativity between the human and the divine.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Essays, Criticism

76 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1980

About the author

Born in Quebec but raised in New Brunswick, Frye studied at the University of Toronto and Victoria University. He was ordained to the ministry of the United Church of Canada and studied at Oxford before returning to UofT.

His first book, Fearful Symmetry, was published in 1947 to international acclaim. Until then, the prophetic poetry of William Blake had long been poorly understood, considered by some to be delusional ramblings. Frye found in it a system of metaphor derived from Paradise Lost and the Bible. His study of Blake's poetry was a major contribution. Moreover, Frye outlined an innovative manner of studying literature that was to deeply influence the study of literature in general. He was a major influence on, among others, Harold Bloom and Margaret Atwood.

In 1974-1975 Frye was the Norton professor at Harvard University.

Frye married Helen Kemp, an educator, editor and artist, in 1937. She died in Australia while accompanying Frye on a lecture tour. Two years after her death in 1986 he married Elizabeth Brown. He died in 1991 and was interred in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto, Ontario. The Northrop Frye Centre at Victoria College at the University of Toronto was named in his honour.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop...

Reviews

[Kay Pelham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good, wise, honest, and well-thought out words as expected from Prof. Frye.

[David]

I pulled this one off my shelves just looking for a short book that I could be reasonably sure I would finish before the end of 31 December. As it turns out, Frye gets into all sorts of things in this little short book that are useful for my English literature since 1800 course which begins next Thursday. Bonus!

[Beth Bauman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really enjoyable and thought-provoking set of literary criticism essays that stray quite blithely into philosophy, theology, Biblical studies, and sociology. I did not agree with much that Frye said, but found it interesting to think about *why* I did not agree, largely on a religious level. The first chapter was, by far, my favourite, having to do more with archetypes in mythology.

[Bala · Rating 4 out of 5]

A semiotic must–read.

[Rick Patterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although Frye is probably more known for his Shakespearean criticism, where he is an adept and intimidatingly well read scholar who has added clarity to our understanding of that particular set of texts, here he takes on the whole notion of artistic response to our human and spiritual condition. If that doesn't come across as hubris, I haven't expressed the ideas well enough, because it is, on the face of it, a remarkably bold and daring venture to do what Frye is doing here. In his series of lectures--and, again, it is important to understand these as being primarily words that were communicated by speech to a listening audience that may have done better with comprehension if that had been graced with the text ahead of time--he is playing (and that is a very apt description of what he is doing, especially in this context) with the notions of artistic creation as a form of re-creation (re-making something that has an original or Ur-form, in a Platonic sense) as well as recreation (constructing a provisionally essential context that is presented as a sort of game). The whole conversation is surprisingly uplifting because it places the responsibility--and response-ability--for the process of civilization directly on the individual. Frye is relentless in his belief in human possibility, and this is borne out in his conclusion, where he sounds remarkably idealistic for someone who has grounded so many of his arguments in causal inevitability: "If there is a creative force in the world which is greater than the purely human one, we shall not find it on the level of professed belief, but only on a level of common action and social vision" (72). This sounds paradoxical: a super-human creative force must supersede dogma and act more or less socially or communally, adverbs whose adjective forms would pit Frye against much of the conservative forces operating in his own and our times. Only a few sentences later, as if to ensure that his territory is marked unambiguously against the inertia of faith, he is clear in dismissing religion altogether: "Religions, theistic or atheistic, are units which define themselves in such a way as to cut of the possibility of their being parts of larger wholes, even when they are compelled to act in that way by expediency. We are perhaps now in a period of history at which this looks more like pride and delusion than like faith" (73).
I should give Frye the last word, but it remains to be said again that he presents a very positive, encouraging, and motivating perspective from which the only reasonable response is the need "to recreate both our society and ourselves" (73).