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This article is a series of reflections on the uses Northrop Frye made of Johan Huizinga’s thesis about the play element in culture. It also glances at Frye’s view of homo ludens found in Proverbs 8:30–1 and in Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game.

The following article is a study of the influence of Karl Barth on the thinking of Northrop Frye and other connections between the two, such as neo-orthodox currents of thought in the 1930s at Emmanuel College, the importance of John Line and W.W. Bryden in Canadian theology at the time, the similar views of Frye and Barth on the analogia entis, natural theology, the Word, and metaphor. While direct influence of Barth on Frye is difficult to demonstrate conclusively, the references to Barth in Frye's work are sufficient to suggest that the great theologian did have an impact on the literary critic, whose international reputation had already established itself by the time of Barth's death in 1968. The present study is the thirty-second in a series of essays devoted to Frye and others, “others” referring to writers who were in differing ways important to Frye but about whom he never wrote anything extensive—an essay or a book or a chapter of a book. What Frye has to say about each of the “others” derives fr...

This article explores the relationship between Northrop Frye and R.S. Crane, a connection resulting from their several contacts with each other in the 1950s, before the publication of Anatomy of Criticism. Frye was influenced by the neo-Aristotelian Crane, sometimes obliquely, and Crane was aware of the theoretical power of Frye as it had begun to emerge from four essays he had published in the Kenyon Review and the University of Toronto Quarterly. This article looks at what resulted from these two critics having rubbed up against each other.

In a recently discovered document, Northrop Frye reflects on the metaphors of rise and decline in the philosophies of history of St. Augustine, Edward Gibbon, Oswald Spengler, and Arnold Toynbee, and he raises the possibility of their being a Christian philosophy of history.

This article traces the influence of Hegel upon Frye’s thought, beginning with the extraordinary paper he wrote on romanticism as a twenty-year-old undergraduate and continuing through his two books on the Bible, The Great Code and Words with Power and his posthumously published The Double Vision. It seeks to demonstrate what Frye means by saying, “If Hegel had written his Phenomenology in mythos-language instead of in logos-language a lot of my work would be done for me.” Particular attention is paid to the ways the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung plays out in Frye’s dialectic, which characteristically works to resolve the opposition between two categories. The article also considers the importance of the ladder metaphor in both Hegel and Frye.