Celebrating Northrop Frye

On October 4, at Victoria University in the University of Toronto, a gala celebration marked the centenary of the birth of the great Canadian critic and cultural philosopher Northrop Frye and the completion of the thirty-volume scholarly edition of his works, published by the University of Toronto Press.

Former McMaster President Alvin A. Lee has been general editor of this major humanities project since 1996, working with sixteen other scholars from Canada, the US and Australia.These include Joseph Adamson and Lois Wilson from McMaster and Glen Gill at Montclair University who did his doctorate at McMaster.

A renowned critic and theorist, Frye’s writings have been translated into numerous languages and are read and used widely.

The celebration was part of a three-day international conference, Educating the Imagination, sponsored by the Department of English and the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. In one of the plenary lectures Frye was described as the greatest visionary thinker of the 20^th century.