Northrop Frye and Patanjali
This essay explores the points of contact between the eminent Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye (1912-1991) and Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutras. Early in his academic career Frye wrote a ground-breaking study of William Blake, Fearful Symmetry, but his international reputation was based largely upon hi...
| Published in: | Nidān |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Univ.
2017
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| In: |
Nidān
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| Further subjects: | B
Tao
B Zen Buddhism B Frye B Patanjali B Yoga B Confucianism |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Summary: | This essay explores the points of contact between the eminent Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye (1912-1991) and Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutras. Early in his academic career Frye wrote a ground-breaking study of William Blake, Fearful Symmetry, but his international reputation was based largely upon his comprehensive study of literary conventions, Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Twenty years after its publication the Anatomy was the most frequently cited book in the arts and humanities by a writer born in the twentieth-century. During the 1970s he wrote a definitive study of romance, The Stubborn Structure, followed by a study of the social context of literature, The Critical Path. Toward the end of his life he published two books on the Bible, The Great Code and Words with Power. The basis of all this writing was a firm and expansive grounding in the Western literary tradition. But with the publication of the 30-volume Collected Works of Frye (1996-2012), which includes his previously unpublished papers (notebooks, diaries, student papers, typescripts of talks), we have begun to see that while Frye was firmly rooted in Western liberal humanism in its Classical and Christian forms, he is more interested in Eastern thought than is commonly imagined. Thus, he was able not simply to engage in worlds outside of what he called his "cultural envelope" but to assimilate Eastern religious principles into his own world view. Eastern influences on his thinking include the Lankavatara and Avatamsaka Sutras, Zen Buddhism, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Taoism (Tao-te Ching and Chuang-tzu), Confucianism (I Ching), and Patanjali’s yoga. The present paper is an exploration of the relationship between Frye and Patanjali. It seeks to answer the question, what did Frye learn from Patinjali’s Yoga-Sutras? |
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| ISSN: | 2414-8636 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Nidān
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.58125/nidan.2017.1 |