Literacy Studies

HUMANITIES 401 and were subject to certain obvious limitations as to form and content," which accounts for a disappointing facility and glibness. Even more limiting is the mould into which John Drainie's contributors were obliged to fit their stories, the nine Or ten minute reading On radio. With few exceptions these pieces unfold their special single quality of quaintness, charm, whimsy, sentiment, or surprise and then are at once forgotten. The two novels that remain need only be mentioned: Agaguk (Ryerson , pp. viii, 229, $4.95), a robust story of Eskimo life by the leading French-Canadian novelist Yves Theriault, first published in 1959 and now translated into English by Miriam Chapin; and Ultramarine (Clarke, Irwin, pp. 203, $4.00), a revised version of Malcolm Lowry's highly autobiographical first novel, written originally when he was eighteen and published in 1933, interesting enough to any curious about the long foreground to those great works of fiction, Under the Volcano and Hear Us 0 Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place. HUMANITIES LITERARY STUDIES It is cause for celebration when any man publishes six books in a single year, more when that man is Northrop Frye and the books are these. The most considerable of the six is, to be sure, a retrospective collection , and yet only two of the articles in Fables of Identity, Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World [Longmans Canadal, pp. vi, 264, $3.55) date from before Anatomy of Criticism (I957). The quartet of essays that comprise its opening section, while almost as theoretical as the Anatomy, are much more readily accessible to the educated non·specialist, and those many admirers of Principal Frye who have had difficulty breaking into the earlier book (or, once in, breaking out) are advised to begin here, especially since the rest of the collection applies, with a teacher's repetition and a wit's variety and surprise, the concepts of myth and archetype and displacement established at the outset, and applies them to just those writers (Ruskin excepted) On whom we have come to expect from Frye a very special and sympathetic illumination-Spenser, Shakespeare, Blake, Byron, Yeats, and Joyce, to name perhaps half. The book includes two exceptionally fine essays that might have got lost, one in a Festschrift, the 402 LETTERS LN CANADA: 1963 other in a professional periodical-a characterization of late eighteenthcentury literature under the title "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibiliry ," and an address to a congress of psychiatrists on the topic, "The Imaginative and the Imaginary." I must say I consider it a mistake to publish a book of such permanent interest and value as a paperback original. "The hinge of the total argument ... is my conception of Romanticism. The Romantic movement in English literature seems to me now to be a small part of one of the most decisive changes in the history of culture, so decisive as to make everything that has been written since postRomantic , including, of course, everything that is regarded by its producers as anti-Romantic." This statement (from the introduction to the Fables) prOvides the bridge to two other books: Romanticism Reconsidered , Selected Papers from the English Institute (New York: Columbia University Press [Copp Clark], pp. 144, $3.75) which Frye edited and to which he contributes "The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism"; and the study of T. S. Eliot in the series with the general title Writers and Critics (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd [Clarke, Irwin], pp. 106, paper $1.25). Of the ten thousand possible things that may be said in over-simplification of Romanticism, Frye starts (being Frye, to whom fourfoldness is what the quincunx was to Sir Thomas Browne) with four. Romanticism has a historical centre of gravity, 1790--1830; it is not a general historical term but has another centre of gravity in the creative arts; in application to the arts it is selective, applying to some artists of the period and not oth·ers; and, though selective, it is not voluntary, associating for example "Byron and Wordsworth, to their mutual disgust, with each other." Adroitly side-stepping the two traps in the phrase "history of ideas"for historical events either...