Northrop Frye on Religion ed. by Alvin A. Lee, Jean O’Grady

REVIEWS sages from Wells’s early essays throughout and, thus, presents a varied mosaic of social and Darwinian ideas from the end of the century. This wide variety of short passages does justice to the com­ plexity of Wells’s relation to the social and scientific thought of his time, but also makes it more difficult to single out the most important influences, which might have been represented by more continuous extracts. For instance, key passages from Huxley’s “Evolution and Ethics” are there, but I should like to have seen more of them, along with more emphasis on the close relation of specific ideas in this essay to the social themes of The Time Machine. This is a very minor criticism, however. Hux­ ley’s major ideas are there for the attentive student to pick up. Ruddick also provides informative footnotes on The Time Machine, several selective bibliographies— particularly gener­ ous ones on criticism— and a chronology of Wells’s life. This readable and well-informed edition is a must for any course with The Time Machine on the reading list. By bringing so many im­ portant ideas and sources together, it also makes an important contribution to contemporary Wells criticism. MASON HARRIS / Simon Fraser University Northrop Frye on Religion. Ed. Alvin A. Lee and Jean O ’Grady. Vol. 4 of Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. 432. $29.95 paper. In the opening.address at the Frye and the Word conference at McMaster University in May 2000, Alvin A. Lee, the General Editor of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye, argued that Frye was not really religious in the sense in which that word is generally understood. This conclusion was immediately chal­ lenged by the pastor of a nearby United Church. The nature of Frye’s religious convictions continued to be one of the discus­ sion points as the conference progressed. The question of Frye’s beliefs is rather like the question John Henry Newman asked of Thomas Arnold during the theological controversies that sur­ rounded the Oxford Movement, “But is he a Christian?” (42). The only way one can answer such a question is by means of 233 ESC 27, 2001 a definition of what it means to be religious, or more specif­ ically what it means to be a Christian. Now that Alvin Lee and Jean O ’Grady have edited Northrop Frye on Religion, Vol­ ume 4 of the Collected Works, readers are in a better position to evaluate Frye’s beliefs for themselves. He was quite reticent about his own convictions in public utterances for most of his life (though not in correspondence or private notebooks). Some secular-minded critics, however, always suspected that Frye’s literary criticism was inflected with Christianity, while some Christians found his literary approach to the Bible threatening or misguided. The volume is divided into two parts. The first, “On the Bible and Human Culture,” includes ten essays, all from the lat­ ter part of Frye’s career and generally closely connected to the two books on the Bible that he published in the last decade of his life, The Great Code (1982) and Words with Power (1990). Part One of the volume also contains two short books, Cre­ ation and Recreation (1980) and The Double Vision (1991), both of which originated in series of lectures on the University of Toronto campus. The latter is quite well-known as Frye’s last book, appropriately with a Blakean title, which contains a more personal statement of his own beliefs than can be found in the earlier books. Two of the most memorable pieces in the collection, revealing Frye at his best, are “The Bride from the Strange Land,” a meditation on the Book of Ruth given as an address at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto, and “Repetitions of Jacob’s Dream,” which was a lecture accompanying an ex­ hibition at the National Gallery in Ottawa. Frye continually returns to the topic of creation in his writings on religion, and Lee’s introduction emphasizes the way that the relatively littleknown Creation and Recreation clarifies his understanding of this topic. Frye rejected the focus on what Lee describes...

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