Northrop Frye's expansive and influential lectures on the literary symbolism of the Bible given during 1981-2 are arguably among his best and most accessible works. This thirteenth volume in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye gathers together these lectures and Frye's notebooks on the Bible, Dante, and Eastern religion. The eleven holograph notebooks and the twenty-four lectures transcribed here present new insights into Frye's personality, methods, and thought, and complement the other published editions of Frye's notebooks in this series, The Late Notebooks (2000) and The 'Third Book' Notebooks (2002).

The notebook material comes mostly from the 1970s, when Frye was at work on the first of his books on the Bible, The Great Code, but also includes one notebook from the 1940s, another from the 1960s, devoted to Frye's reading of Dante's Purgatorio and the first ten cantos of the Paradiso, and another from the 1980s, when Frye was at work on his second book on the Bible, Words with Power. Fully annotated, this latest volume in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye will be an invaluable addition to any literary or religious scholar's library.