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The Making of the English Canon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jonathan Brody Kramnick
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Abstract

This essay discusses the origins of the literary canon in mid-eighteenth-century England, looking in particular at the changing reputations of Shakespeare and Spenser. Situating the writing of English literary history within the context of the cultural market, print culture, and nationalism, I argue that the mid-century model of literary history both represents the dialectical outcome of previous decades of thinking through the problem of cultural change and puts in place the terms for the modern narrative of the literary canon. An earlier aesthetics of gendered and sociable refinement separated itself from a Gothic past later recovered as the singular moment of literary achievement. The Gothic account was then challenged by a rethinking of consumption as reading abstracted over time. Together, Gothic historicism and abstract reading formed the antithetical basis on which critics established the modern canonical account of English literary history.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 112 , Issue 5 , October 1997 , pp. 1087 - 1101
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1997

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