Although the first anthology of Mexican poetry dates from 1833, Alejandro Higashi argued in his seminal volume PM-XXI-360 that the primary role of the anthology in Mexico changed in 1966. Traditionally a genre that presents a selection of previous work shaped by a certain notion of taste, the anthology took on an overtly prescriptive role with the first edition of Poesía en movimiento, edited by Octavio Paz, Alí Chumacero, José Emilio Pacheco, and Homero Aridjis. This text has remained in print ever since, and has privileged a practice of “demanding poetry” that has been taken up by later anthologies. The chapter also discusses the “cloning lab” of the anthology and how this phenomenon can be discerned in the profusion of anthologies published since the 1980s.

Certain poetic practices in Mexico which have traditionally received less attention from scholars have recently regained currency, and even urgency in poetic critique. This chapter explores the openly political and popular underside of twentieth-century Mexican poetry, starting with the Estridentismo movement and moving on to works by José Emilio Pacheco, Eduardo Lizalde, Renato Leduc, Efraín Huerta, Rosario Castellanos, Jaime Sabines, Francisco Hernández, Jaime Reyes, and Ricardo Castillo, among others, as well as the political poetry recently reprinted in the twenty volumes of the Archivo negro de la poesía mexicana. The chapter also examines two significant but historically silenced trends: poetry written by women and literature in Indigenous languages.

This chapter places Carnap in the history of twentieth-century philosophy by pointing out different tensions in canon formation of philosophy. It also introduces key concepts and notions of the volume, along with chapter summaries.

This chapter traces the transformation of the Persian poetic classics from a living textual corpus into a pantheon of heritage objects for the use of national literary institutions. Its focus is on the creation of national literatures for the Soviet eastern republics of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan from their establishment until the late Stalin period, but it shows how those literatures coevolved with Iranian and Turkish national canons, and with cosmopolitan and international post-Persianate canons. In its readings of the major classical poets Rudaki, Firdawsi, Khayyam, Nizami, Nava’i, and Bidil in modern anthologies, commentaries, and theatrical adaptations, the chapter emphasizes the asynchronous intervention of the classical poets themselves in their reception. The creation of these national literatures was a successful contestation of the representative authority of Western orientalists by national scholars, writers, and cultural officials, which would be widely imitated by postcolonial state cultural bureaucracies during the Cold War. The chapter’s central episodes are a series of anthologies published in Istanbul and Moscow in the early 1920s for Turcophone readerships; the founding Tajik anthology composed by Sadr al-Din ‘Ayni; the attack on the canon mounted by Central Asian radical folklorist–critics; and the Stalinist jubilees for classical Persianate poets.

While the canon of twentieth-century Russian poetry has expanded considerably in recent decades, little attention was paid to most of the poetry written about World War One for almost a hundred years. The conflict occupied a marginal position in Soviet-era cultural memory; many of the poets who wrote about it were similarly sidelined, although the war was commemorated by émigrés. The poetic response to the war was aesthetically diverse and expressed attitudes ranging from an enthusiastic embrace of patriotic duty to pacifism. There were few ‘soldier poets’: Nikolai Gumilev was among the very few established or aspiring poets who actively pursued front-line military service. As the centenary of the war’s outbreak approached, and interest grew in Russia’s imperial history and émigré culture, scholars and editors have begun to introduce readers to this unfamiliar poetic legacy. The process of forming a canon of World War One poetry is only just beginning.

Although Langston Hughes remains one of our most widely published authors, few attempts have been made to chart the circulation of his works across dozens of anthologies during the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Yet an examination of 180 collections published over more than ninety-five years shows how editors collectively made Hughes a representative and at the same time exceptional black writer. The authors of this chapter use data management and analyses to understand a variety of patterns associated with the extensive processes of anthologizing Langston Hughes from 1923 through 2020. Their project reveals how Hughes reprints make him a statistical outlier, not merely widely published, and further, their research indicates the importance of incorporating quantitative approaches into the study of African American publishing history.

This chapter considers the social, political and historical circumstances that impact on literary translation into a minor language, with specific reference to the case of the Macedonian language spoken in the Republic of North Macedonia. An overview of the history of translation is first provided, beginning with the codification of the Macedonian language with the emergence of the Republic of Macedonia as a sovereign state within the Yugoslav federation. The chapter further discusses how the country gaining independence from Yugoslavia upon its breakup affected translation trends, and thus the quality of translated literary works. Finally, the chapter provides insight into how a recent authoritarian government abused political issues regarding identity to launch and realize a gargantuan government project involving the translation of hundreds of books within an extremely short period of time, thereby forever altering the literary landscape of the culture and setting harmful precedents regarding translation policies.

This chapter surveys the formation of German vernacular literature between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. Instead of one single beginning, from which all the rest flows, we encounter a series of inaugural gestures and moments of inception, not all of which extended into posterity. The great monuments of Old High German literature, produced in the ninth century, are isolated works that did not give rise to continuous traditions of textual production; for that development, we have to wait until the second half of the eleventh century, when an astonishingly self-assured and formally sophisticated literature – now linguistically Middle High German – burst onto the scene. In the course of the twelfth century, religious genres were joined by secular ones, and the pragmatic functions of informing and instructing the public were supplemented by an interest in the potentialities of poetic language and distinctly literary modes of cognition. Finally, by the early thirteenth century, a palpable sense had emerged among collectors and authors that German literature has both a canon and a history; the constitution of manuscript anthologies and literary genealogies represents a further beginning in the formation of German literature as a dynamic system, as well as itself positing beginnings.

The ability of Irish poetry to secure a place in the canon is intimately tied to structures of power and authority – structures with a strongly gendered character. Historically, the Irish tradition has been fractured by numerous traumas and the programmatic exclusion of poetry by women. Anthologies are key drivers in canon formation, but have been heavily slanted against equal representation of male and female poets. Often, women will achieve representation in one anthology only to disappear from view in the next; and applying a historical overview, we find that the twentieth century is often worse in this regard than previous eras. A number of case studies are considered, with close attention to questions of group dynamics, literary movements, citationality, and the role of the academy and the anthology.

Arrangements for string instruments were highly popular in the first part of the nineteenth century, but they had served a purpose and market different to that for the piano transcriptions that now took centre stage. The former were played by men, the latter by women; the focus during string quartet parties was on developing the performer, the latter on displaying the performer to best advantage. Piano performances, whether solo or in ensemble combinations, tended to be demonstrations to the audience of feeling, taste, and a moderate level of technical accomplishment—suitable attributes for a woman. Public performance and publication now took over the main role in canon formation, while chamber music’s meaning and function was redefined and split off from the dazzling Salonmusik and the still performance-based but decorous Hausmusik. The public quartet concerts of the 1820s and ’30s (especially those of Schuppanzigh’s quartet), along with reviewers’ endorsements of silent listening, and Beethoven’s increasingly difficult conceptions, changed the status of that genre.

The chapter considers an agreement between Beethoven and his publisher Steiner as a crucial moment in the history of musical publication. In 1816, Beethoven and Steiner had decided to issue Wellington’s Victory and the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies in arrangements for various combinations of chamber group simultaneously, and concurrent with the original orchestral edition in parts and score. Important here, and moving well outside publication ‘business as usual’, was the issuing of complete scores. These demonstrate the evolving conception of the musical work: silent score study would gradually replace the hands-on reception and construction of the musical work of the arrangements for chamber ensemble. It is also significant that this new publishing strategy began with Wellington’s Victory, which was thus treated as a significant work for study and performance, although it has tended to be marginalised as mere ‘occasional music’ after Beethoven’s time. In total there were eight different editions released at once for Wellington’s Victory (and the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies). This strategy shows comprehensiveness, musically and socially. But it was also a matter of economic sense.

Whereas much scholarship on the history of the novel focuses on its relationship to large narrative forms such as epic or romance, this chapter argues that the novella tradition plays a central role in the development of the novelistic world. We show how intercalated novellas, translated or adapted from Italian or Spanish, inflect the emergence of the French novelistic canon, functioning as sites at which cultural difference is explored and managed. Material from the novella tradition helps shape and define the notions of national character and identity, as well as the role of a national language, in the emerging French canon. The chapter moves from the history of translation and editing, through a discussion of Scarron and Mme de Lafayette, to a study of the politics of genre.

Chamber arrangements of Beethoven’s large-scale works ‘especially his symphonies’ were so prevalent in the nineteenth century that to ignore them is to miss an essential part of the reception or ‘life history’ of the works in question. The depth and dissemination of the arrangements of Beethoven’s works show that these arrangements, rather than the original versions, were an essential means by which Beethoven’s music took effect. In an era when concert performances were still relatively few, an arrangement was often the first instantiation of a Beethoven orchestral work that one would hear. This chapter explores these arrangements as nineteenth-century reception documents, looking at what they tell us not only about Beethoven, but also about the arrangers themselves and the processes of canon formation at the time. The chapter then considers the apparently new ways in which meanings are constructed for the symphony, through performance, and how these relate to Eroica myths and legends born in Beethoven’s day. It discusses ways in which the work has been performed, represented visually, and marketed in the twenty and twenty-first centuries, including the 2003 BBC production, Eroica.