Joseph Frank (1918–2013) was an American literary scholar and critic, widely recognized for his extensive work on the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. Born Joseph Nathaniel Glassman, he pursued higher education at institutions including New York University and the University of Chicago, where he earned his Ph.D. Frank had a distinguished academic career, teaching at the University of Minnesota, Rutgers, and notably serving as a professor of comparative literature at Princeton from 1966 to 1985, concluding his teaching at Stanford.

His most significant contribution is his five-volume biography of Dostoevsky, a work considered a definitive account of the novelist's life and writings. This monumental study, totaling over 2,400 pages, was later condensed into a single volume. Beyond Dostoevsky, Frank's scholarly interests extended to other Russian and Ukrainian writers. He also developed a significant theory of "spatial form" in modern literature, exploring how modernist works often present narrative in a non-chronological, spatially apprehended manner, drawing parallels with theories of artistic abstraction.

Joseph Frank was born Joseph Nathaniel Glassman in New York City in 1918. After his father's death, his mother remarried, and the family relocated to Brooklyn. Frank attended New York University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, though he did not complete a bachelor's degree at either. His academic journey led him to Paris on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1950, and subsequently to the University of Chicago, where he obtained his Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought. He married Marguerite Frank, a mathematician, in 1953. Frank's teaching career spanned several universities, including the University of Minnesota and Rutgers, before he became a professor of comparative literature at Princeton in 1966. He retired from Princeton in 1985 and finished his academic career at Stanford University. Frank passed away in 2013 due to pulmonary failure, survived by his wife and two daughters.

Frank is most renowned for his monumental five-volume biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, a scholarly undertaking that began in the 1970s and spanned over two decades to complete. This comprehensive work, which meticulously details Dostoevsky's life and literary output, is widely regarded as the most authoritative biography of the Russian novelist, even in Russian. The individual volumes, published between 1976 and 2002, were later synthesized into a single, condensed volume titled "Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time," released in 2009. Frank's dedication to Dostoevsky earned him widespread acclaim, with critics hailing his biography as a landmark achievement in literary scholarship. His posthumously published "Lectures on Dostoevsky" further cemented his legacy as a preeminent interpreter of the author's work.

Beyond his Dostoevsky scholarship, Frank made a significant contribution to literary theory with his concept of "Spatial Form." Initially presented in a series of essays starting in 1945, this theory was later collected in the book "The Idea of Spatial Form" (1991). Frank's theory posits that much of modern literature, particularly modernist works, departs from traditional chronological narrative. Instead, he argued, these works often present their content in a spatial rather than temporal manner, where past and present are juxtaposed to create a sense of timeless unity. This approach, he suggested, mirrors the abstraction and non-representational tendencies observed in the plastic arts, drawing inspiration from the work of art historian Wilhelm Worringer. Frank's innovation lay in synthesizing Worringer's ideas on artistic form with observations on literary techniques like non-chronological storytelling and unusual syntax common in modernist poetry and prose.

“The heart of Worringer's book consists in his discussion of the spiritual conditions which impel the will-to-art to move in the direction of either naturalism or its opposite.”

“The heart of Worringer's book consists in his discussion of the spiritual conditions which impel the will-to-art to move in the direction of either naturalism or its opposite. Naturalism, Worringer points out, always has been created by cultures that have achieved an equilibrium between man and the cosmos. Like the Greeks of the classical period, man feels himself at one with organic nature; or, like modern man from the Renaissance to the close of the nineteenth century, he is convinced of his ability to dominate and control natural forces. In both these periods man has a relationship of confidence and intimacy with a world in which he feels at home; and he creates a naturalistic art that delights in reproducing the forms and appearances of the organic world. [...] On the other hand, when the relationship between man and the cosmos is one of disharmony and disequilibrium, we find that nonorganic, linear-geometric styles are always produced.”

“By this juxtaposition of past and present, as Allen Tate realized, history becomes ahistorical. Time is no longer felt as an objective, causal progression with clearly marked-out differences between periods; now it has become a continuum in which distinctions between past and present are wiped out. And here we have a striking parallel with the plastic arts. Just as the dimension of depth has vanished from the sphere of visual creation, so the dimension of historical depth has vanished from the content of the major works of modern literature. Past and present are apprehended spatially, locked in a timeless unity that, while it may accentuate surface differences, eliminates any feeling of sequence by the very act of juxtaposition. Ever since the Renaissance, modern man has cultivated both the objective visual imagination (the ability to portray space) and the objective historical imagination (the ability to locate events in chronological time); both have now been abandoned.”