Eminent Northrop Frye scholar Robert D. Denham explores the connection between Frye and twelve writers who influenced his thinking but about whom he didn't write anything expansive. Denham draws especially on Frye's notebooks and other previously unpublished texts, now available in the Collected Works of Frye. Such varied thinkers as Aristotle, Lewis Carroll, Søren Kierkegaard, and Paul Tillich emerge as important figures in defining Frye's cross-disciplinary interests. Eventually, the twelve "Others" of the title come to represent a space occupied by writers whose interests paralleled Frye's and helped to establish his own critical universe.etymology, and something quite akin to Longinian ekstasis.
As Denham became more familiar with Frye's previously unpublished work, other figures important to Frye's thinking began to emerge, including Giordano Bruno, Joachim of Floris, Henry Burton, Søren Kierkegaard, Frances Yates--writers to whom he had not devoted separate books or essays (as he had done in the case of Blake, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickinson, Keats, Shelley, Eliot, Joyce, Yeats, Stevens, the Bible, and Spengler, among others). The twelve "others" eventually came to represent a space occupied by writers whose interests paralleled Frye's and helped to establish his own critical universe.