Northrop Frye’s Renaissance Conference
When and Where
Speakers
Description
“The greatness of Frye,” writes Fredric Jameson, “and the radical difference between his work and that of the great bulk of garden-variety myth criticism, lies in his willingness to raise the issue of community and to draw basic, essentially social, interpretive consequences from the nature of religion as collective representation.” In the years since the height of Canadian literary critic and theorist Northrop Frye’s influence, the category of religion has received renewed scholarly attention in early modern literary, artistic, and historical studies. This scholarship has illuminated the formative role of religion on the aesthetic, economic, and political transformations associated with modernity and therefore affords a new opportunity to reconsider Frye’s religiously inflected criticism and its critiques. Do the transformations of modernity constitute a “radical break,” as for Jameson, that makes impossible the trans-historical project of Frye’s “archetypal criticism”? What is the relationship between the synthetic or universalizing ambition of Frye’s critical project and the material, historical, and cultural particularities that attend literary production and criticism? How do these particularities inflect both Frye’s critical project and our own critical, scholarly, and pedagogical practices in the modern Canadian university?
Our conference will consider such questions through a series of panels incorporating a range of perspectives on Frye, the Renaissance, and early modern literary studies in Canada. Students, faculty, and members of the community are warmly invited to attend.
Northrop Frye’s Renaissance Conference
Keynote Speaker
Mark Vessey, University of British Columbia
Mark Vessey studied English at Cambridge, Patristics in Paris, and Ancient History at Oxford. He was a member of the Department of English at the University of British Columbia from 1989 until his retirement in 2025, and Principal of Green College at UBC between 2008 and 2023. His research has been mainly in the fields of literary history and theory, history of the book, and history of scholarship, with a predilection for Latin writers of late antiquity (especially Jerome and Augustine) and Erasmus. Publications include Latin Christian Writers in Late Antiquity and Their Texts (2005), the Blackwell Companion to Augustine (2012, as editor) and, most recently, Erasmus on Literature (2021, as editor) and chapters on “Literature and the Church in the Post-Constantinian Empire” and “The Critical Opportunity of Later Latin Literature” for the Cambridge History of Later Latin Literature (2026). A selection of his articles, provisionally entitled Patristics as Literary History / History of the Book: Re-reading Christian Writers from Latin Late Antiquity is in preparation for the series Receptio Patristica: Studies in the Afterlife of Early Christian Texts and Writers.