Moving between an analysis of the canon as a critical mechanism and a focus on the physical limits and definition of Latin literature, the chapter reviews the very discourse of the canon and its impact on the field. The ‘canonised’ nature of Classics determines not just a hierarchy of texts and methodologies worthier of being taught and researched but also informs the very approach to non-canonical or ‘para-canonical’ texts. Any canon, in other words, is not just about what we study, it is also about how we study it. Opening up the canon is a dynamic and self-reinforcing process and one which involves both readers who embody difference (social, racial, gender etc.) accessing and studying an expanded and evolving canon, and texts that embody difference (peripheral, post-classical, marginal etc.) being ‘read into’ the canon by an increasingly diverse readership. Interrogating our canon of Latin literature, this chapter argues, implies a fundamental repositioning of one’s scholarly stance not just towards non-canonical texts but also towards canonical authors.

“Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art”: This maxim from Fitzgerald’s notebooks squares with his ambition to be among the greatest American writers of his time. Fitzgerald’s evolving sense of who his era’s giant writers were – through the judgments of what he called “the cultural world” – led him by the time he wrote The Great Gatsby and just after to align his work with an elite, international modernism. But as this chapter demonstrates, Fitzgerald’s fiction remained relatively conventional in the context of revolutionary modernism, in good part because of his care for ordinary readers. And the high regard he professed for writers like Joyce, Stein, and Conrad did not preclude his generous interest in more ordinary contemporaries. His wide, eclectic reading of his contemporaries reveals the actual catholicity and conventionality of his literary tastes. The argument suggests that while Fitzgerald’s reputation was bolstered by his positioning himself on the side of the anti-commercial and avant-garde values of the modernist literary field, it was his professional commitment to good, affective writing that proved most crucial to his winning what he most coveted: literary immortality.

With his ‘imaginary portraits’, Pater developed a hybrid genre blending biography with travel writing, fiction, and criticism. The cross-pollination between Pater’s fiction and his essays remained strong throughout his career. This chapter explores how Pater employed the genre to engage with both English and French critics (Arnold, Newman, Sainte-Beuve) in the debates about the relations between reading, writing, the individual, and the nation through a series of character sketches. Seen in the light of an unfinished manuscript for a lecture on English literature, Pater’s early imaginary portraits raise questions of periodisation, of how far back the beginnings of English literature could be traced, while essentially questioning its Englishness. Stressing the significance of medieval rather than Elizabethan literature in the formation of a national canon, Pater selected Chaucer as the proclaimed father of English literature, thus selecting a writer with a profound European background, whose character sketches in The Canterbury Tales in some respects became precursors of Pater’s own studies of the individual.

While framing devices in editions of the Workes have been recognised for their innovative elevation of a vernacular English poet, the extent of their cultural influence has not been fully documented. This chapter argues that the new presentation of Chaucer the man and his works in print gave rise to a broader attributional and biographical impulse on the part of his early modern readers. It notices readers’ embellishment of manuscripts and older printed books with authorising paratexts in the same period that parallel conventions commemorated Chaucer in contemporary prints. Inscriptions of the author’s name, lists of contents, standardised titles, comments on the canon, and imitations of his printed portrait were added to older books, manuscript and printed, by early modern and eighteenth-century readers who sought to improve those volumes according to the new aesthetic and scholarly standards codified in print. Chaucer’s printed works have long been implicated in the rise of the figure of the author, and this readerly desire for paratextual devices with which to frame his life and work provides new evidence for an emergent preoccupation with authorship in the Chaucerian book.

This chapter demonstrates the influential role of printed books in defining Chaucer’s canon and the implications of that newly formed canon for older books. It considers a series of texts which early modern readers added to manuscripts (and some early printed books) to update and improve them: short poems including Prophecy, Words to Adam, and Bon counsail; Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid; various Plowman-themed texts; the Tale of Gamelyn; and the Retraction. The chapter argues that print made available an array of genuine and apocryphal works which readers could extract, assemble, and reconfigure in line with their own tastes and understanding of the Chaucer canon. The evidence collected in the chapter shows the persistence of particular narratives about Chaucer’s works which were promoted in print: that he was a poet of fin amour, that he condemned Criseyde to a wretched death, that he assigned his Plowman an anticlerical tale, and that the Retraction was a later monkish forgery. The changeability of the manuscript books chronicled in this chapter reflects a concurrent reshaping of Chaucer’s reputation in the period and the variability of his literary canon itself.

Addressing a chronology of texts – the Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads, the Preface to its second edition, the ballad Michael, and the “Residence in France” sections of the 1805 Prelude – this chapter reconsiders Wordsworth’s great decade as a struggle between two types of honor: a commercial value of hierarchy that operated within the day’s market for “dignified” literary productions, and a social value of egalitarianism that allowed poetry to appeal to the “native and naked dignity” inherent in all humankind, regardless of economic status. Addressing a legacy of criticism on Wordsworth’s canonicity and self-fashioning, this chapter demonstrates how honor refigures Romantic cultural capital, inasmuch as Wordsworthian honor pits society against commerce. Such a tension between honorable egalitarianism and commercial success reframes the poet’s politics. Addressing claims that Wordsworth became more conservative as his career progressed, this chapter shows how he also stages a classic paradox inherent in liberalism: the conflict between market distinction and social equality.

We define canonicity as a variable property of all cultural discourses: it refers to the extent to which the components of a given discourse – its terms, texts, practices, etc – tend to inhere within it over time. Law and religion may both be characterized as strongly canonical discourses, meaning that they tend not to change over time. This property stems from the particular functions that law and religion play within human culture; hence it is not dependent on the political ends to which law and religion are often used.

We follow Peter Berger’s assertion that any religion posits a particular conception of the cosmos; hence religion is irreducibly descriptive. In contradistinction to science, the descriptive elements of religion are generally not falsifiable by empirical observation. This resistance to falsification is what makes religion strongly canonical.

In contrast, legal discourse is irreducibly prescriptive. It is distinct from other prescriptive systems, such as morality, in the paramount value it places on consistency, both at any given moment and over time. This diachronic consistency is reflected in the fact that, once established, laws tend to remain in force until formally changed or annulled; this is the strong canonicity of law.

This essay reflects on how Indigenous communities have maintained their own literary canons, often outside the mechanisms that literary scholars tend to associate with canonicity: large institutional archives, formal publishing and republishing, placement in major anthologies and college syllabi. The essay argues that Indigenous canonicity is not a static tradition from which texts can be either lost or added; it is not a privatized or extractive business. Rather, it is a collective, contributive process in which tribal members share in the multiple functions of editing, archiving, writing, reading, interpreting, and publishing. These community-based processes and conversations turn up a wealth of essays, poems, recipes, and histories that haven’t typically attracted the attention of settler teachers, publishers, or collecting institutions – perhaps because they were not written for settlers. The Indigenous literary histories that Indigenous communities remember and cherish, instead, document and imagine who the people are, where they come from, and where they are going. The essay concludes with a reflection on Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks’s notion of “the gathering place” – referring to any collective exercise of Indigenous cultural authority and exchange – as a model of Indigenous writing and canon making.

By the end of the twentieth century, trailblazing novelists such as W. Adolphe Roberts, Roger Mais, John Hearne, V. S. Reid, and Garth St Omer, were out of print, and their immense contribution to the Caribbean literary landscape obscured. The reasons for the short-lived popularity of these Caribbean novelists range from the interplay of race; the compass of the thematic reach of their novels; the radically evolving sociopolitical landscape within which these writers were being read; and international dynamics of critical reception. The mapping out of these trajectories of oblivion also reveals a fascinating network of alliances, affiliations, and geo-locations that is core to the literary history of the Caribbean. The chapter, in showcasing the current reprinting efforts of these aforementioned novelists by publishing houses such as Peepal Tree Press and the University of the West Indies Press, argues that academicians can also play a role in this literary comeback. In engaging with the relevance of these restored novelists to contemporary critical contexts, teachers and critics can help locate the reprinted texts within the complicated and intricate dynamics of Caribbean society, ongoing literary debates, and the tradition of homage Caribbean writers paid and continue to pay to each other.

The history of literary production in Ireland shows a traumatic cleavage between the Irish-Gaelic and English languages. The history of literary reception and canonicity shows, however, a bicultural literary continuum, constructed, from the early to mid-nineteenth century on, mainly by a tradition of anthologizing. This tradition still continues and incorporates both the production of scholarly text editions and poem collections for the general readership.

This chapter considers the evolution from the 1940s to 1980 of what was initially constructed by Daniel Corkery and others as ‘Anglo-Irish literature’, and its serial problems of inclusion and definition. In particular, it examines the shifting approaches to literary criticism from Seán O’Faoláin’s articles in The Bell to the Crane Bag and Field Day pieces by Seamus Deane in the 1970s and early 1980s. It opens with a discussion of the criticism which emerged in the 1940s and 1950s from Richard Ellmann and W. Y. Tindall, before discussing contributions made to the magazine Studies by Denis Donoghue, Vivian Mercier and Donald Davie, with varying degrees of attachments to New Criticism. This develops into an analysis of the polemical criticism of the 1960s by those such as Conor Cruise O’Brien, before discussing the foundation of the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature in 1970, which became a platform for women academics but did not deviate from a general focus on canonical male authors. It concludes by discussing the Troubles-shadowed 1970s criticism of later Field Day critics like Deane and Terence Brown, with the former in particular interrogating literature to reveal its imbrication in what he insisted was a colonial condition.

The decades that followed 1940 in Ireland are conventionally framed in terms of literary underperformance and political exhaustion. This introduction sets out the volume as an important intervention into this common perception, energised by what can be considered a quantitative turn in Irish cultural criticism, with a concomitant spatial expansion of what can be termed ‘Irish literature’. This gives way to a discussion of how an ingrained theme in twentieth-century critical perspectives – that of distance between Irish culture and European and international influences – is belied by a contemporary literature which registered the impact of proximity and connection. The introduction goes on to discuss how these connections are measured by subsequent essays in the volume, some of which are thematised around literary traffic between Ireland and Europe, America, Britain, and beyond. The genres which contained these communications are also discussed in contributions, alongside the often interrelated questions of language, publishing, and reception, amongst others. In its conclusion, the essay describes the fragility of the Irish literary canon, offering the Irish writing of this period as uneven despite the international recognition that many of its authors were receiving.

Bibliographical recoveries have decisively challenged older views about Victorian Ireland’s supposed failure to produce fiction, but the perception that the Irish novel was in many ways anomalous remains a hallmark of scholarship on the period, regardless of whether that anomaly is deplored or celebrated. This chapter reviews the main theories that have used sociological, cultural, ideological and economic factors to analyse the marginality and generic deviancy of Irish fiction, where realism is often overshadowed by allegorical and Gothic strains. It then suggests that the aesthetic standards that are used to assess the idiosyncrasies of Irish Victorian novels remain implicitly indebted to influential but questionable definitions of realism in Anglo-American literary criticism. While acknowledging some of Irish fiction’s differences from the realist canon, this chapter also highlights their mutual imbrication by tracing Irish influences and inspirations in the works of various English and French realists, and the latter’s roles in Irish literary history. Ireland’s paradoxical blend of peripherality and proximity to the centres of nineteenth-century European cultural production is here used to recontextualise terms like realism, allegory and Gothic, and to emphasise their porousness not just in Irish writing, but in the very canon from which Irish Victorian fiction is too often segregated.

In this chapter, female homosocial relationships are explored as confident articulations of female identity and as suggestive models of political governance. Despite widespread anxiety about female-only assembly and scepticism regarding the virtues of female friendship, women writers in this period evidently found friendship between women to be a theme in which they could articulate and explore a range of feelings and emotions not otherwise sanctioned by their culture. The chapter considers a range of poetry and fiction – by Charlotte McCarthy, Margaret Goddard, Olivia Elder, Frances Sheridan and her daughter Elizabeth – in relation to differentially situated ideas of ‘sisterhood’ before turning to the ways in which Ireland came to be figured as a ‘sister’ kingdom to Britain in the later century, thus shaping the proto-feminism of earlier traditions in new, national formations.

‘Transposing the Restoration’ explores connections between, and assesses the cumulative impact of, the three main chapters of The Restoration Transposed. It considers the book’s implications for issues and topics such as translation, the transition from a manuscript- to a print-based literary culture, the spread of English-language literary publishing outside London, the participation and presentation of women in the literary sphere, and the development of the English literary canon. It also describes and seeks to account for the differing characters of each of the literary decades from the 1660s to the 1690s. It concludes by considering how the fresh perspectives offered by The Restoration Transposed may alter perceptions of poets as various as Milton, Marvell, Dryden, Cowley and Rochester and makes the case for the transposed Restoration as offering a view of its poetry that is less narrow and elitist and more sympathetic and open to diversity than conventional accounts of the period.

‘The Spenser Problem’ considers how writers and critics of the Restoration read, responded to and evaluated the works of Edmund Spenser, especially The Faerie Queene. Spenser, who had died in 1599, was regarded by many in this period as among the most important poets in English literary history, the only Englishman worthy of comparison with canonical European poets such as Homer and Virgil. Yet he was also frequently disparaged by Restoration critics on grounds of his archaic language and his unfashionable style (both his use of allegory and his supposedly unwieldy stanzaic form). ‘The Spenser Problem’ surveys critical responses to Spenser by both well- and little-known writers, the former including such poets as Cowley, Milton, Oldham, Behn and Dryden. It also focuses on Jonathan Edwin’s 1679 edition of Spenser’s Works – the first new collected Spenser since the 1610s – arguing for its importance both within the history of Spenser reception and within larger narratives of English literary history. Crucial in establishing Spenser’s canon and reworking his reputation in the light of Restoration norms and preoccupations, Works (1679) also pioneered the republication of English poetry of ‘the last age’ in a manner later taken up by booksellers such as Jacob Tonson.