Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Vols. 5 and 6: Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World ed. by Robert D. Denham, Vol. 7: Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education ed. by Jean O’Grady and Goldwin French, Vol. 8: The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942–1955 ed. by Robert D. Denham (2002)

ESC 28, 2002 parasites would always demand the sacrifice of blood from the working masses” (344). It is this use of art as functioning pri­ marily to deliver a political message criticizing colonialism, neo­ colonialism, and post-independence governments that has both alienated critics and appealed to a generation of writers. While at the University of Guelph doing my MA, I took a reading course on the works of Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o with G. D. Killam. In my notes for Matigari, I wrote: “I find Matigari to be an oversimplification of the issues intro­ duced in Ngugi’s earlier novels. I am resistant to the repetition of thinly disguised M arxist doctrine that persists throughout the text. Matigari is overly didactic, moralizing, and pedantic. Instead of writing a novel, Ngugi seems to have been writing a polemic on the value of M arxist ideology and the necessity for popular rebellion.” Although I have since mellowed quite considerably as a critic and I have actually taught Matigari twice in a class of African literature, I still find myself favour­ ing Achebe’s softer vengeance over Ngugi’s prescriptive prose. W hen I initially wrote these words nine years ago, I would have benefited from a book like Lovesey’s that contextualized Ngugi’s work so thoroughly. I shall still benefit from having read this book, particularly as I continue to teach African literature. LAURA MOSS / U n iv e rsity o f B ritis h C olu m bia Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Vols. 5 and 6: Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982-1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. 949. $75.00 cloth each volume. Vol. 7: Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education. Ed. Jean O’Grady and Goldwin French. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. 684. $100.00 cloth. Vol. 8: The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942-1955. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. 821. $125.00 cloth. Four volumes of Northrop Frye’s diaries, notebooks, and uncol­ lected essays, meticulously edited, extensively annotated, and handsomely produced, in addition to the four already in print, 782 REVIEWS extend our sense of Frye’s personal life as well as the processes of his thinking, the thinking that produced one of the most influential bodies of criticism of the twentieth century. In par­ ticular, they help us to see how integrated Frye’s thought was — how for him literature, religion, the arts, education, and social and political life were all part of the same endeavour, how he “findjs] [him]self constantly returning to the assumptions and intuitions of [his] earliest critical approaches” (7: 606), and how he used his notebooks and diaries to record and work out ideas that he later developed in his published work. Although, as Robert Denham notes, Frye often said that he had arranged his life to be without incident (8: xxiii), anybody who has worked on literary papers and archives will expect to learn that Frye’s domestic and working lives, lived in a particular social and in­ tellectual context, fed the creative and spiritual life of the great public figure. In the Introduction to the Diaries volume, Denham also notes that, if the distinction between diaries and notebooks is that diaries are personal records of daily events, while note­ books are personal reflections on literary, political, or religious issues, Frye’s diaries tend to move in the direction of notebooks, while his notebooks move in the direction of diaries. In both, pri­ vate and public content overlap. The Diaries volume is prim ar­ ily but not entirely private, while the two Notebooks volumes, in which Frye is working out the patterns for Words with Power and The Double Vision, are primarily public, both in the sense that they contain material intended to lead to publication and in the sense that, as Denham observes, there is some internal evidence that Frye expected that they would eventually be pub­ lished. Yet they contain quite a lot of personal m aterial as well. The Writings on Education volume is a collection of published pieces ranging from Frye’s student days...