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The Literary Canon

     ⋮   Audio version below

To enjoy reading literature one book at a time is a great experience, but any time we choose one literary work to read and not another, whether we’re aware of it or not, we are making a small decision that touches on the larger and rather thorny issue of the literary canon, a list of works that are considered timeless and classic. However, what works of literature are included and excluded, how this list changes over time and who gets to decide is a very complex consideration. As students of literature, it is important to understand the influence and politics of the literary canon.

The term ‘canon’ originated in ancient religious circles and the concept was later adopted by a diverse list of secular disciplines. The Oxford English Dictionary provides a good definition of the initial religious use of the term as, “the collection or list of books of the Bible accepted by the Christian Church as genuine and inspired,” but more relevant to our discussion is the OED’s additional literary definition: “a body of literary works traditionally regarded as the most important, significant, and worthy of study; those works of esp. Western literature considered to be established as being of the highest quality and most enduring value; the classics (now frequently in the canon).” For a more modern and casual definition, a canon is a list of the best composed, critically accepted, or culturally influential works in a given category.

These collections of canonical works exist in music, film, visual art and many other artistic mediums. Laypeople frequently experience them through well-regarded institutions like Washington D.C.’s National Symphony Orchestra, New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art or Random House’s Everyman’s Library Series of classic books. Long-standing institutions don’t have a monopoly on canonical art though: because of the internet, the sheer volume of human artistic output, our limited time to devote to artistic appreciation and the human propensity for obsessive list-making, a staggering number of increasingly specialized ‘best of’ and classics lists are a search away (e.g. classic French poetry, the best samurai films). However, there is something more significant about a canon compared to a ‘best of’ list, and part of the distinction might harken back to the original purpose of the term and the idea that canonical works are somehow more holy and revered than others. The process of creating a canonical list of works is an ancient one too: classical Greek and Roman scholars were creating and debating lists of canonical poets, plays, histories and biographies in antiquity.

The creation and curation of canons is also a necessary process. In any civilization that survives and flourishes long enough, thousands of works of art are created each year, each decade, each century and beyond. They are not of equal quality and cannot be remembered equally, so it’s largely the job of the next generation to decide which works get remembered and which works get relegated to the dustbin of history. This isn’t so much a single process by one person, but rather is the collective work of critics, historians, museum curators, librarians, publishers and regular people like us. We all decide what works should be remembered and which ones don’t make the cut.

There’s a specific canon of American literature as well, but like most conversations about American culture, it’s complicated. As just one example of the old American Literary Canon, the list of authors included in Charles Cleveland’s 1859 Compendium of American Literature contains many authors who are still read today (Edgar Allen Poe and Harriet Beecher Stowe), but many more who are now mostly forgotten (have you read any Grenville Mellen or Bayard Taylor lately?).

In the last 60 years or so, the traditional literary canon has come under criticism for essentially being white, male, wealthy and straight, and thereby only representing a small percentage of our otherwise wildly diverse nation, and this is a legitimate criticism. Modern additions to the canon have made it much more diverse and relevant. 20th century scholars re-introduced the poetry of 18th century African-American poet Phyllis Wheatley. More recently, women, people of color, and different ethnicities are now better represented in literature and being included in the canon. And it will never be perfect. Traditionalists will argue that the old canon was better (you just have to read Moby Dick), while different readers might applaud progress, but criticize the current, presumably better canon for leaving out a subset of writers or perspectives (Which Asian-American writers should be added, and why haven’t they?).

For a good illustration of this debate, David Handlin wrote an article for American Scholar in July, 2014 titled, “One Hundred Best American Novels, 1770 to 1985 (a Draft).” Handlin includes his list of top 100 novels and follows it with a discussion of how he went about making his choices. Interestingly, one month later, scholar and poet Sandra Gilbert published “List, List, O List!” in response to Handlin’s initial article in which she proposes 100 additions to his list and debates his criteria and decision-making process and the philosophical basis of canons in general. The back-and-forth debate between the two gives a good glimpse into the traditionalist/revisionist debate about the literary canon.

Today’s standard literary canon is most often communicated through the textbooks and syllabi of high school and college American literature survey courses. A different measure for which books are valued today, either through sales or critical praise, are best illustrated by The New York Times best sellers list and long- and short-listed works for awards like the Nobel Prize for Literature or the National Book Award. Searching online for “American literary canon” brings up dozens of good lists from a wide variety of sources that collectively illustrate the types of literary works in the canon today. The advent of the internet has also made Amazon’s lists of bestsellers and Goodreads’ lists of most popular books of the year influential and user-generated alternatives to the traditional gatekeepers of canonical literature. The make-up of the American literary canon will be an ongoing conversation, as it should, as long as The United States exists and Americans are creating literature. It’s an important conversation too, because it gets at what it means to be American, who represents us, what ideas define us, what art we value, and what values and ideas we want to preserve for future generations.

Finally, as English professors and editors of this anthology, we grappled with these very same questions of which canonical and noncanonical writers to include, and what those decisions mean to us and to our students. The stories in this anthology were selected based on their inclusion in the literary canon, with special attention paid to the extension of the canon to include the voices of women and people of color. Literary critics Clare Hanson and Marie Louise Pratt claim that the short story is a marginalized genre aligned with women and oppressed social outsiders. While the novel is often the focus of literary criticism and conversation, less attention is paid to the short story. Likewise, since the creation of the formal literary canon, women and people of color have created important literary works but have been traditionally excluded from the academy. We worked to create an extensive resource that includes multiple works from major authors, along with lesser known short stories from a diverse set of voices. In the early works included here, readers will find the expected offerings from Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen Crane paired with lesser-known works by Charles Chesnutt and Ryunosuke Akutagawa. In the contemporary section, readers will have access to an evolving compilation of new literary voices like Carmen Maria Machado and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, emerging authors who are redefining the genre.

Think about how this discussion of the American literary canon relates to our class:

  1. The readings from our anthology, especially the earlier stories before 2000, are good examples of what is currently thought of as “classic” short stories. What kind of stories do you see on that list? What kinds of authors wrote them? What characters, plots and themes do they explore? What common literary elements do you see in classic literature? What stories, people and voices do you NOT see on that list?
  2. Look through the 21st century short story list. What are new and emerging writers doing today? How similar or different are the characters, plots and themes compared to the classics in this anthology? What stories do you think will be considered classic in 50 years? Which will be forgotten?
  3. Finally, think about what an ideal literary canon would look like today. What kind of voices, stories and writers represent the best of American culture today?