John Fraser (born 1928) is a British academic, writer and art critic. He spent much of his career in the United States and at Dalhousie University in Canada. He wrote three printed books and many other works published in digital form, and publicised the work of his late wife, the American artist Carol Hoorn Fraser.
Biography
Born in North London in 1928, and educated at a provincial grammar school, John Fraser entered Balliol College, Oxford, in 1948 as an Exhibitioner (junior scholar)and read English. In 1953 he moved to the States, taking the Barzun-Trilling and doing a Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, with a dissertation on George Sturt, rural labouring life, and the rhetoric of sociological presentation, plus a minor in Philosophy, including classes from Wilfred Sellars and Alan Donagan.
In 1961, he and the Minnesota artist Carol Hoorn Fraser moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he taught at Dalhousie University, retiring in 1993 as George Munro Professor of English.
During his academic career he published three books with Cambridge University Press, and numerous articles. In 1990 he gave the Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto, on Nihilism, Modernism, and Value. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
After Carol's death in 1991 he co-curated a show of her work, A Visionary Gaze (1993), and engaged in extensive archival work on her art and life. His website, Jottings.ca, was conceived as a vehicle for extending her reputation. It rapidly branched out, and now includes the equivalent of several print books.
A reviewer of his Violence in the Arts (1973) spoke of Fraser’s "extremely agile and incessantly active mind which illuminates almost every subject it touches." Another called his magnum opus, America and the Patterns of Chivalry (1983), "a brilliant and utterly absorbing work" and said that "There are not many learned books which have the unputdownable quality of a thriller; this is one of them."
The series in which his The Name of Action; Critical Essays (1984) appeared was "established to publish in paperback for an individual readership the Press’s most outstanding monographs."
Published works
Print books
Violence in the Arts (Cambridge, CUP, 1974); illustrated pb 1976 hc / pb
America and the Patterns of Chivalry (Cambridge, CUP, 1982) The Name of Action: Critical Essays (Cambridge, CUP, 1984) pb [Shakespeare, Scott Fitzgerald, Twain, Emily Brontë, Stephen Crane, B. Traven, Pauline Réage, Yvor Winters, Northrop Frye, Swift, J.L. and Barbara Hammond, George Sturt, Eugène Atget, the organic community].
E-books
Nihilism, Modernism, and Value (Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com, 2013) A Bit of This and a Bit of That about Poetry (Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com, 2013) Thrillers (Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com, 2014) Desires; Sixty-Five French Poems plus a Small but Famous German One, translated by John Fraser (Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com, 2014) Pushing Back: Language, Truth, and Consequences (Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com, 2015) Focusing: Drawings by Carol Fraser, edited by John Fraser and Barbara Bickle (Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com, 2015) Moments: 100 photographs by John Fraser (Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com, 2015) Gardens of Delight and Power: Images by Carol Hoorn Fraser, edited by John Fraser and Barbara Bickle (Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com, 2015) Dwellings: Watercolours by Carol Hoorn Fraser, edited by Barbara Bickle and John Fraser (Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com, 2015) Interfacing: 22 photographs by John Fraser (Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com, 2016) Camera Work (revised edition): 35 Photographs by John Fraser (Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com, 2017)