Northrop Frye is one of the few twentieth-century critics in North America with an international reputation. Harold Bloom refers to Frye as "the foremost living student of Western literature," adding that he is "certainly the largest and most crucial literary critic in the English language" since Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. Lawrence Lipking and A. Walton Litz see Frye as one of the four major critics of this century, placing him in the company of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and I. A. Richards. "More than any other modern critic," says Lipking, "he stands at the center of critical activity."

In his own country Frye's reputation is also considerable. In 1982 the Canadian weekly, Maclean's, devoted its cover story to his work, and The Great Code (1982) remained for a number of months on the Canadian best-seller list. A public figure in Canada, Frye has frequently been summoned from the...