Abstract
Texts and contexts seem inextricable, so that literary and historical worlds are intertwined. Writer, critic, and historian all have an education in language and the ways it reflects, refracts, and deflects the world. Although the imperial theme and the connection between the colonial and postcolonial are significant themes in literature and history, they are among other key concerns. Reason in history exists side by side with imagination in history. Historical writing has an imaginative aspect just as literary writing has some regard for the world and its “facts” even as it might seek to escape them.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For permission to reprint revised versions of two articles that contribute to this chapter, thanks to Rajnath, editor, for “Educating the Imagination: The General Principles of Northrop Frye’s Criticism,” Journal of Literary Criticism 6 (1993): 50–66, and to the editor (who happens to be me) of the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature on behalf of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association for this version that revises a section of “Frye’s Anatomizing and Anatomizing Frye,” CRCL/RCLC 19 (1992): 119–54. For variations on Frye as a writer, see Jonathan Hart, “The Road Not Taken: The Fictions of Northrop Frye,” The British Journal of Canadian Studies 9 (1994): 216–37; “The Quest for the Creative Word,” in Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works, ed. David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 55–71; Interpreting Culture: Literature, Religion, and the Human Sciences (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). As one of Northrop Frye’s many former students, I would like to remember him with thanks as this book may well come out in the centenary of his birth.
For Frye’s sense of irony and wit in conversation, see Criticism in Society: Interviews with Jacques Derrida, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Frank Kermode, Edward Said, Barbara Johnson, Frank Lentricchia, and J. Hillis Miller, ed. Imre Salusinszky (New York: Methuen, 1987), 27–42, and David Cayley, Northrop Frye in Conversation (Toronto: Anansi, 1992).
John Ayre, Northrop Frye: A Biography (Toronto: Random House, 1989), 9–19.
Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 10–11.
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 3.
Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1963), 31–33.
Northrop Frye, The Modern Century (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967), 110–18.
Northrop Frye, Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974–88, ed. Robert D. Denham (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 3.
Northrop Frye, The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971, rpt. 1973), 34–35.
Northrop Frye, Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), xiii.
Northrop Frye, The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965).
Northrop Frye, The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 22–23.
Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), xii–xiii.
Frye Great, 230–32. For my earlier related work, see “The Mystical-Visionary Criticism of Northrop Frye,” Christianity and Literature 41 (1992): 277–98, and Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). See also Northrop Frye, On Education (Markham, ON: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1988).
Copyright information
© 2012 Jonathan Locke Hart
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hart, J. (2012). Education and Imagination. In: Fictional and Historical Worlds. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137012647_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137012647_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-34332-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-01264-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)