Northrop Frye and Karl Barth

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 from brief, discontinuous statements scattered throughout the twenty-nine volumes of his Collected Works, especially Frye’s astonishing notebooks. These notebooks have begun to reveal that the extraordinary success of Anatomy of Criticism should not overshadow the writing of the last decade of Frye’s rich career.