Western canon  

The canon of Renaissance English poetry of the 16th and early 17th century has always been in some form of flux and towards the end of the 20th century the established canon was criticized, especially by those who wished to expand it to include, for example, more women writers.<ref name="auto1">Template:Cite book</ref> However, the central figures of the British renaissance canon remain, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Donne.<ref>"English Poetry" James P. Bednarz. Oxford Bibliographies</ref> Spenser, Donne, and Jonson were major influences on 17th-century poetry. However, poet John Dryden condemned aspects of the metaphysical poets in his criticism. In the 18th century Metaphysical poetry fell into further disrepute,<ref>"Life of Cowley," in Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets</ref> while the interest in Elizabethan poetry was rekindled through the scholarship of Thomas Warton and others. However, the canon of Renaissance poetry was formed in the Victorian period with anthologies like Palgrave's Golden Treasury.<ref>Gary F. Waller, (2013). English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century. London: Routledge. p. 262</ref>

In the twentieth century T. S. Eliot and Yvor Winters were two literary critics who were especially concerned with revising the canon of renaissance English literature. Eliot, for example, championed poet Sir John Davies in an article in The Times Literary Supplement in 1926. During the course of the 1920s, Eliot did much to establish the importance of the metaphysical school, both through his critical writing and by applying their method in his own work. However, by 1961 A. Alvarez was commenting that "it may perhaps be a little late in the day to be writing about the Metaphysicals. The great vogue for Donne passed with the passing of the Anglo-American experimental movement in modern poetry."<ref>Alvarez, p. 11</ref> Two decades later, a hostile view was expressed that emphasis on their importance had been an attempt by Eliot and his followers to impose a 'high Anglican and royalist literary history' on 17th-century English poetry.<ref name="ODNB">Brown & Taylor (2004), ODNB</ref>

The American critic Yvor Winters suggested in 1939 an alternative canon of Elizabethan poetry,<ref>Poetry, LII (1939, pp. 258-72, excerpted in Paul. J. Alpers (ed): Elizabethan Poetry. Modern Essays in Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.</ref> which would exclude the famous representatives of the Petrarchan school of poetry, represented by Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. Winters claimed that the Native or Plain Style anti-Petrarchan movement had been undervalued and argued that George Gascoigne (1525–1577) "deserves to be ranked […] among the six or seven greatest lyric poets of the century, and perhaps higher".<ref>Poetry, LII (1939, pp. 258–72, excerpted in Paul. J. Alpers (ed): Elizabethan Poetry. Modern Essays in Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967: 98</ref>

Towards the end of the 20th century the established canon was increasingly under fire.<ref name="auto1"/>

Expansion of the literary canon in the 20th century

In the twentieth century there was a general reassessment of the literary canon, including women's writing, post-colonial literatures, gay and lesbian literature, writing by people of colour, working people's writing, and the cultural productions of historically marginalized groups. This reassessment has resulted in a whole scale expansion of what is considered "literature", and genres hitherto not regarded as "literary", such as children's writing, journals, letters, travel writing, and many others are now the subjects of scholarly interest.<ref name=Blain/><ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

The Western literary canon has also expanded to include the literature of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South America. Writers from Africa, Turkey, China, Egypt, Peru, and Colombia, Japan, etc., have received Nobel prizes since the late 1960s. Writers from Asia and Africa have also been nominated for, and also won, the Booker prize in recent years.

Feminism and the literary canon

Template:See also [[File:Sartre and de Beauvoir at Balzac Memorial.jpg|150px|thumb|Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at Balzac Memorial ]] The feminist movement produced both feminist fiction and non-fiction and created new interest in women's writing. It also prompted a general reevaluation of women's historical and academic contributions in response to the belief that women's lives and contributions have been underrepresented as areas of scholarly interest.<ref name=Blain>Template:Cite book</ref>

However, in Britain and America at least women achieved major literary success from the late eighteenth century, and many major nineteenth-century British novelists were women, including Jane Austen, the Brontë family, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot. There were also three major female poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning,<ref name="Leighton">Template:Cite book</ref> Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson.<ref name="Bloo9">Bloom (1999), 9</ref><ref>Ford (1966), 122</ref> In the twentieth century there were also many major female writers, including Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, and Marianne Moore. Notable female writers in France include Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Yourcenar, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras and Françoise Sagan.

Much of the early period of feminist literary scholarship was given over to the rediscovery and reclamation of texts written by women. Virago Press began to publish its large list of 19th and early 20th-century novels in 1975 and became one of the first commercial presses to join in the project of reclamation.

Black authors

In the twentieth century, the Western literary canon started to include black writers not only from black American writers, but also from the wider black diaspora of writers in Britain, France, Latin America, and Africa. This correlated largely with the shift in social and political views during the civil rights movement in the United States. The first global recognition came in 1950 when Gwendolyn Brooks was the first black American to win a Pulitzer Prize for Literature. Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart helped draw attention to African literature. Nigerian Wole Soyinka was the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, and American Toni Morrison was the first black woman to win in 1993.

Some early American Black writers were inspired to defy ubiquitous racial prejudice by proving themselves equal to white American authors. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has said, "it is fair to describe the subtext of the history of black letters as this urge to refute the claim that because blacks had no written traditions they were bearers of an inferior culture."<ref name = "Stryz_p140">"The Other Ghost in Beloved: The Specter of the Scarlet Letter" by Jan Stryz from The New Romanticism: a collection of critical essays by Eberhard Alsen, p. 140, Template:ISBN.</ref>

African-American writers were also attempting to subvert the literary and power traditions of the United States. Some scholars assert that writing has traditionally been seen as "something defined by the dominant culture as a white male activity."<ref name = "Stryz_p140"/> This means that, in American society, literary acceptance has traditionally been intimately tied in with the very power dynamics which perpetrated such evils as racial discrimination. By borrowing from and incorporating the non-written oral traditions and folk life of the African diaspora, African-American literature broke "the mystique of connection between literary authority and patriarchal power."<ref>Quote from Marjorie Pryse in "The Other Ghost in Beloved: The Specter of the Scarlet Letter" by Jan Stryz, from The New Romanticism: a collection of critical essays by Eberhard Alsen, p. 140, Template:ISBN.</ref> In producing their own literature, African Americans were able to establish their own literary traditions devoid of the white intellectual filter. This view of African-American literature as a tool in the struggle for Black political and cultural liberation has been stated for decades, most famously by W. E. B. Du Bois.<ref name = "jhu_theory">Mason, "African-American Theory and Criticism" (accessed July 6, 2005).</ref> [[File:WoleSoyinka2015.jpg|thumb|Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka in 2015.]]

Asia and Africa

Since the 1960s the Western literary canon has been expanded to include writers from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. This is reflected in the Nobel prizes awarded in literature.

Yasunari Kawabata (1899 – 1972)<ref>{{

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Naguib Mahfouz (1911 – 2006) was an Egyptian writer who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. He is regarded as one of the first contemporary writers of Arabic literature, along with Tawfiq el-Hakim, to explore themes of existentialism.<ref>Template:Cite document</ref> He published 34 novels, over 350 short stories, dozens of movie scripts, and five plays over a 70-year career. Many of his works have been made into Egyptian and foreign films.

Kenzaburō Ōe (b. 1935) is a Japanese writer and a major figure in contemporary Japanese literature. His novels, short stories, and essays, strongly influenced by French and American literature and literary theory, deal with political, social, and philosophical issues, including nuclear weapons, nuclear power, social non-conformism, and existentialism. Ōe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994 for creating "an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today".<ref name="shimbun2008">"Oe, Pamuk: World needs imagination", Yomiuri.co.jp; May 18, 2008.</ref>

Guan Moye (b. 1955), better known by the pen name "Mo Yan", is a Chinese novelist and short story writer. Donald Morrison of the U.S. news magazine TIME referred to him as "one of the most famous, oft-banned and widely pirated of all Chinese writers",<ref name="Holding Up Half The Sky">Template:Cite magazine</ref> and Jim Leach called him the Chinese answer to Franz Kafka or Joseph Heller.<ref name="Leach">Template:Cite journal</ref> He is best known to Western readers for his 1987 novel Red Sorghum Clan, of which the Red Sorghum and Sorghum Wine volumes were later adapted for the film Red Sorghum. In 2012, Mo was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work as a writer "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".<ref name="Mo Yan får Nobelpriset i litteratur 2012">Template:Cite news</ref><ref name="Nobel">{{

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Orhan Pamuk (b. 1952) is a Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic, and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. One of Turkey's most prominent novelists,<ref name="Kinzer1998-12-15">Template:Cite news</ref> his work has sold over thirteen million books in sixty-three languages,<ref name="AutoEC-3">Template:Cite news</ref> making him the country's best-selling writer.<ref name="AutoEC-4">Template:Cite news</ref> Pamuk is the author of novels including The White Castle, The Black Book, The New Life, My Name Is Red, Snow, The Museum of Innocence, and A Strangeness in My Mind. He is the Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he teaches writing and comparative literature. Born in Istanbul,<ref>{{

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Latin America

Octavio Paz Lozano (1914 – 1998) was a Mexican poet and diplomat. For his body of work, he was awarded the 1981 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1982 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature. [[File:Gabogarciamarquez1.png|thumb|left|upright|García Márquez signing a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude in Havana, Cuba]]

Gabriel García Márquez<ref>"García Márquez". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.</ref> (1927 – 2014) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, and journalist. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century and one of the best in the Spanish language, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.<ref>{{

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García Márquez started as a journalist, and wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style labeled as magic realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations. Some of his works are set in a fictional village called Macondo (the town mainly inspired by his birthplace Aracataca), and most of them explore the theme of solitude. On his death in April 2014, Juan Manuel Santos, the President of Colombia, described him as "the greatest Colombian who ever lived."<ref>{{

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Mario Vargas Llosa, (b. 1936)<ref>"Vargas Llosa" Template:Webarchive. Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.</ref> is a Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, essayist, college professor, and recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a larger international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom.<ref>Template:Harvnb and Template:Harvnb</ref> Upon announcing the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy said it had been given to Vargas Llosa "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat".<ref>{{

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Examples

Examples of shorter canonical lists of most important works include the following:

• Bibliothèque de la Pléiade
• Directed Studies at Yale University curriculum
• Great Books
• Great Books of the Western World
• The Harvard Classics
• Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century – books of the 20th century
• Modern Library 100 Best Novels – English-language novels of the 20th century
• ZEIT-Bibliothek der 100 Bücher German Die Zeit list of 100 books
• Library of America
• Everyman's Library (Modern works)
• The Modern Library
• Penguin Classics
• 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

Origins

The process of listmaking—defining the boundaries of the canon—is endless. One of the notable attempts in the English-speaking world was the Great Books of the Western World program. This program, developed in the middle third of the 20th century, grew out of the curriculum at the University of Chicago. University president Robert Hutchins and his collaborator Mortimer Adler developed a program that offered reading lists, books, and organizational strategies for reading clubs to the general public.

An earlier attempt, the Harvard Classics (1909) was promulgated by Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot, whose thesis was the same as Carlyle's:

... The greatest university of all is a collection of books. - Thomas Carlyle

Debate

There has been an ongoing, intensely political debate over the nature and status of the canon since at least the 1960s. In the USA, in particular, it has been attacked as a compendium of books written mainly by "dead white European males", that thus do not represent the viewpoints of many others in contemporary societies around the world. Others, notably Allan Bloom in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, have disagreed strongly. Authors such as Yale Professor of Humanities Harold Bloom (no relation) have also spoken strongly in favor of the canon, and in general the canon remains as a represented idea in most institutions, though its implications continue to be debated heavily.

Defenders maintain that those who undermine the canon do so out of primarily political interests, and that the measure of quality represented by the works of the canon is of an aesthetic rather than political nature. Thus, any political objections aimed at the canon are ultimately irrelevant.

One of the main objections to a canon of literature is the question of authority—who should have the power to determine what works are worth reading and teaching?

Works

Works which are commonly included in the canon include works of fiction such as some epic poems, poetry, music, drama, novels, and other assorted forms of literature from the many diverse Western (and more recently non-Western) cultures. Many non-fiction works are also listed, primarily from the areas of religion, mythology, science, philosophy, economics, politics, and history.

Works which directly address the canon (both for and against):

• The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages by Harold Bloom (ISBN 978-1573225144)
• Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom (ISBN 978-1573227513)
• The Dead Father by Donald Barthelme (ISBN 978-0374529253)
• The History of Western Literature by Otto Maria Carpeaux (eight volumes, only available in Portuguese)
• Debating the Canon: A Reader from Addison to Nafisi by Lee Morrissey (ISBN 978-1403968203)

See also

postmodern canon, Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, belles-lettres

• Classicism
• Cultural significance
• Great Conversation
• History
• Literature
• University
• Seminal work
• Relativism