Bücher von Northrop Frye

Presented here is a selection from the professional and personal correspondence of Northrop Frye, one of the preeminent literary critics of the last century. With frank and accessible appraisals, the letters reveal Frye's attitudes toward scores of topics: the value of James Bond thrillers, the gap between faith and reason, surrealism, hippies, Milton's imagery, comparative literature, political hysteria in the U.S., the nature of the educated imagination, anarchism, the teaching of religion in the university, the Proteus myth, the distinction between subjects and themes, the connection between Nietzsche and Yeats, the difference between cliche and aphorism, the fussy rules of copy editors, and scores of other issues.

This brilliant outline of Blake's thought and commentary on his poetry comes on the crest of the current interest in Blake, and carries us further towards an understanding of his work than any previous study. Here is a dear and complete solution to the riddles of the longer poems, the so-called "e;Prophecies,"e; and a demonstration of Blake's insight that will amaze the modern reader. The first section of the book shows how Blake arrived at a theory of knowledge that was also, for him, a theory of religion, of human life and of art, and how this rigorously defined system of ideas found expression in the complicated but consistent symbolism of his poetry. The second and third parts, after indicating the relation of Blake to English literature and the intellectual atmosphere of his own time, explain the meaning of Blake's poems and the significance of their characters.