When is Literature? What is a Canon?

Two cheers and three caveats.

One cheer is simply for disturbing the too-easy orthodoxy of the moment about when the canon of English (or British) literature became established, the other for starting to sort out some distinctions, most notably between the term “literature” and the concept (or rather various concepts) for which it has come to stand All three caveats involve the need for yet further distinctions.

1. 1. The idea of literature and the idea of a canon are not identical either, at least in the current popular sense of the latter term (as in “the canon wars”). “Canon” now (often, but not always) is a distinct subset of the former, although a canon can be so large as to seem (or even be) identical, depending on how questions of quality, scope, and reach are applied. A canon need not include all writing that gets over a basic definitional threshold, just that which is considered crucial to preserve, venerate, and invest with authority (to invoke the old religious terms from which our secular sense of valuing texts and of canonicity seems to derive). The so-called Apocrypha—those Old Testament books rejected by Judaic scholars and excluded from Protestant Bibles (although often attached in an appendix)—exemplify the distinction; although the Reformation rejected their sacredness and authority (that is, their canonicity) it continued to concede the value, beauty, and uses of these books (their “literature”). In most modern definitions, aspiring to a particular kind of writing counts for quite a lot in making a text “literary” but for very little in making it canonical; that is, a writer may consciously set out to produce “literature” but getting into the “canon” is something others decide about later: a canon is, as the OED puts it, “a test, criterion, means of discrimination.” Most poems of a certain ambition and magnitude (and works in some—but shifting—prose genres as well) are allowed to be “literature,” whatever their quality or degree of acceptance: they need to fit but they need not be exemplary. Thus, Shakespeare and Mary Shelley are now “canonical writers” (though they once were not), whereas Shakerley Marmon, Lady Mary Wroth, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, and Mary Barber (though their writings include what nearly everyone would call “literature”) are not canonical: however fading or budding their reputations, they are not in Bloom.

2. 2. Terry’s proposed term “creative writing” simply won’t do historically as a synonym for literature, not only because it is both anachronistic and fuzzy (as Clifford Siskin noted), but also because the word “creative” is itself a very vexed one historically. Being creative—in the senses of being innovative, original, individualistic, subjective, and a host of other post-Romantic virtues—was at best a mixed value in earlier times, and many of the things that subsequent ages treasured the most in creativity stood simply for indulgence, unrestrained subjectivity, and abandoned judgment through much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What would later seem “creative” was for Pope, for example, illustrative of the “uncreative”—what the uncreating Word was capable of as an undisciplined unmaker. Whenever attempts were made (and of whatever sort) before 1750 to define anything like literature, genres like history and the epistle and other kinds supposedly reliant more on fact than fancy—on accepted “truth” rather than imagination or fiction—were included while other “original” texts tended to be omitted as inappropriate, especially if they were too obviously subjective and narrowly personal or private (as autobiography and novels were often thought to be), or if they had any whiff of the ordinary or practical about them. Every inclusion or exclusion was problematic for somebody or other. What, for example, were Scots and Americans with their predilections and directional tendencies to do with suspicions of utility and praxis?

3. 3. Whenever one locates the recognition of literature or the rise of a set canon, one must face squarely the huge intentional issue of omission, or rather exclusion—the in-effect totally negative purposes of the whole process of both definition and canonization, the desire to exclude and rule out potential joiners. The whole...