Northrop Frye
Northrop Frye
Herman Northrop Frye, CC FRSCwas a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth14 July 1912
CitySherbrooke, Canada
CountryCanada
Northrop Frye quotes about
literature study subjects
Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.
literature classic produce
Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic.
imagination world anything-goes
In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
heart centre humans
Even the human heart is slightly left of centre.
writing aphorism translate
Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
stories literature sun
Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphoric thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writerenters intoa structure of traditional stories and images.
writing looks use
We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it still with us.
travel past europe
The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible... to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent.
copying made novel
Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.
block emotional intuition
It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition.
sleep fundamentals language
Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.
writing people giving
For the serious mediocre writer convention makes him sound like a lot of other people; for the popular writer it gives him a formula he can exploit; for the serious good writer it releases his experiences or emotions from himself and incorporates them into literature, where they belong.
understanding intellectual culture
Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.
essence limits culture
It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.