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“A Quest for the Peaceable Kingdom”: The Narrative in Northrop Frye's Conclusion to the Literary History of Canada

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Robert Lecker
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Abstract

The conclusion Northrop Frye contributed to the Literary History of Canada (1965) depicts in narrative form his evolving sense of how critics necessarily become involved in their critical creations and, further, of how the degree of this involvement provides a measure of their own imaginative development. Frye reads the Canadian literary tradition as a romance that implicates him in its structures. Because the conclusion glosses the fall-and-redemption myth that inspires much of his work, it illustrates his conception of literary history making as simultaneously an act of self-making. Viewed from the perspective of Frye's own transforming voyage through it, the conclusion appears in a new light as a romance about the creation of the idea of Canada, a metaphoric conception that is transhistorical, autonomous, and distinctly literary. (RL)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 108 , Issue 2 , March 1993 , pp. 283 - 293
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1993

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