British scholar and critic (1928–2023)
John Fraser (18 July 1928 – 11 September 2023) was 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 on 18 July 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."
Fraser died on 11 September 2023, at the age of 95.