Creation Recreation

In this book, Northrop Frye, one of the leading theorists of his century due to his ingenious contributions to literary theory, examines how the whole of ideas and images surrounding the word "creation" affects the structure and imagery of literature. According to traditional assumption, everything we see as connected to nature, reality, the established order, the normal course, and the givens of existence that we must accept, must go back to the divine act of creation, to the initial making of the universe. When the word "creative" is applied to human activities, whatever is creatively human, whatever profoundly shakes our understanding of "creation," is that; it is the reversal or neutralization of creation. This leads us to the conclusion that what appears to be one of the few extraordinary forms of human achievement—creation specific to the arts—is actually a kind of non-creation.

This book, first presented by Northrop Frye as the 1980 Larkin-Stuart Lectures, offers the reader an interesting, insightful, and thought-provoking perspective on the concept of creation in art.