Ross, Trevor. The Making of the English Literary
Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century.
Montreal & Kingston:
McGill-Queen’s UP, 1998.
Summary by Sarah K. Wilson
Introduction
In this book, Ross intends to provide historical background on some
of the issues that are a major issues in English education today including
1) revising the canon; 2) hierarchal ideas of the canon and literary values;
3) the relationship of author to the text, the canon, and the marketplace;
4) the idea of a fixed meaning of a text; and 5) ideas of set and contingent
evaluative means (18-19). Largely
in the period covered by this book, authors believed in absolute value, but
also “desire[d] to acknowledge change and difference” in the canon,
thus giving value to their own writing (19).
Chapter 2:
Albion’s Parnassus and the Professional Author
William
Covell, a Cambridge don, said in 1595 that English universities should canonize
their authors in order to raise England’s status at home and abroad as a
“symbol of literary eminence” (87). At this time, many thought that canonization was a good idea
and therefore many authors were encouraged to write in a way that would secure
them canonization in order to encourage a lineage of good English writing that
would secure its place as a literary force equivalent to ancient Greece and
Rome (89). According to Ross, the
canon did not serve to promote future great writing at all (90). Rather, “[c]anon-making in this
period was primarily intended to enhance the value of literature in the
vernacular and to help foster the English literary system” (91).
Ross
states that “[c]anon-making in Renaissance critical discourse was almost
always directed at a present community of cultural producers, and while such
canon-making did not deal exclusively with contemporary writings, the
literature of the past was usually recalled to be used to heighten the sense of
the present, to be invoked as a suitable past out of which the current
tradition might be said to have emerged, or to be rejected as obsolescent out
of a need for self definition” (90). Canons made clear the values of great literature and valued
modern work that mirrored this and which therefore allows the production of
literature to be controlled (92).
Neoclassicism became the criteria for good literature; in doing so
medieval forms of writing such as the chivalric romance and contemporary
vernacular necessarily lost value (94).
Defenders of these (past forms and modern vernacular) created resistance
against neoclassicist ideas (95).
However, as modern authors sought to achieve classical standards, they
believed that those standards represented absolute standards by which
literature could be valued -- and they believed that their age was capable of
meeting those standards (96).
Even
though authors were not valued by their individual achievements but by the
advancements of the age, authors did begin to experience competition in their
quest for “patronage and praise” (98-99). Plagiarism became an issue. The authors’ competition became a means of undermining
the canon’s harmony (98).
There
remained a tension throughout the period between admiring the old, seemingly
set standards of value and a desire to open the canon to modern authors
(102).
“Ben
Jonson’s 1616 folio WORKES is the first self-consciously canonical
edition of an author’s works in English literature” (108). This marks a change in thinking to value the author, not the
genre (109). Jonson marks the
beginning of the idea of valuing work based on its intrinsic value (114).
The
1620s’ metaphysical poets represented an early version of the avant
garde, autonomous artists who were not interested in canonization (117). In the face of paradoxical ideas of
literary value, some authors and critics (including Drayton) supported the idea
of valuing literature based on popularity with readers (118). This created a problem because some
canonical authors, including Chaucer, weren’t widely popular in their
time (122).
Chapter 4:
Value into Knowledge
The
Restoration era marks a change in canon criteria due to several factors
(148). Dryden based value on the
king’s taste. He valued the
era over the individual author’s accomplishments (149). According to Dryden, authors
“can, in other words, define their own modernity and unique value by
rejecting an immediate past, but such presentist self-definition cannot serve
as a gesture of self-approbation, of self-persuasion leading to
conviction” (150). Dryden
won’t admit relativism or absolutism -- a tension remains in his criticism
(150). He claims that evaluative
standards are absolute; yet, he also admits that an author’s style,
language, manners, and wit are and should be relative to the age in which the
author is writing (150).
There
is a move in the Restoration to value knowledge and evidence over pleasure and
seduction (151). Likewise, then,
neoclassical rules of literature governed writing like knowledge as a means of
entering the canon (152). These rules provided absolute
evaluative tools; authors argued
that these standards didn’t allow for modernity (154). Thus, some critics tried to propose
value be based on social or natural conditions (155). Increasingly, this objectivist culture longed for objective
values (156). With time, this value
turned to valuing authors and works as a means of determining cultural value
(156). But, the paradox remained a
source of debate for decades (156).
“Instead of circulating value, literature contains it”
(157). This is the start of
aestheticism which maintained that value is based on eloquence (159).
In
the modern era, style became valued as an author’s expression of his
individualism; copyright came as protection for style, not for knowledge which
increased the value of style even more (161-62). Acts of “correction” or
“remodelings,” for example Pope’s corrected edition of
Shakespeare, were common, intended to improve production and consumption
(163).
To
Dryden, the best authors touched on “permanent verities of nature and
human experience” which therefore also meant that the works would enjoy
longevity -- another criteria for literary value (166). Later, historicist arguments are used
to defend canonized authors as a start of a more pluralist, relative view of
the canon (168). In the 18th century,
Addison used a pluralist argument to value both Shakespeare and Milton
(170). Ross points out that the
conflict between absolute standards and relative value will continue until all
tastes in all people in all ages are the same -- which will never occur (172).
Chapter 6:
Reading the Canon
Knowledge
of canonical literature became a sign of “good breeding” which made
the consumption of literature became as important (or moreso) as its production
(210). Ross explains it this way: “This
deepening of the social significance of the reading activity altered the nature
of critical discourse, whose varied functions shifted from aiding the
production to regulating the transmission of canonical works, from prescribing
how works ought to be composed to supervising how they ought to be read and
judged, and from promoting the general symbolic value of writing to ensuring
the legitimacy of an autonomous cultural field” (210). This shift forced critics to
“redefine the basis for their authority and, by extension, the norms for
canonicity” (211). Critics
promoted the idea that the canon is important to read, but to fully understand
it, one needs critics and teachers to explain it (212). “The extended critical effort to
define an authentic Shakespearean text thus reflected an altered cultural
situation where the cultural capital that could come from reading was becoming
recognized as a category of social power” -- and only critics could
provide this kind of power (213).
An example of this new role for critics is Addison's annotated version
of Milton’s Paradise Lost published in the Spectator. Ross claims that “what Addison is
implicitly doing is converting the display of learning into cultural
capital” by making the text something that can only be explained by a
critic (218). This shift also
gives the canon value in itself and not just as a means of promoting the future
of good writing (219). Soon, it
became necessary to have a canon for reading (consumption) and a different one
to serve as a model of production (221).
Literature
in schools, while still mostly presented, began to be considered as something
to be taught. Greenwood’s The
Virgin Muse (1717) provides the first example of an anthology intended to
teach poetry (221). Ross claims
that Addison’s notes on Paradise Lost probably inspired
Greenwood’s book (221). In
1751, Benjamin Franklin suggested that schools teach the great authors
(222). James Barclay in 1743
emphasized the importance of students reading AND understanding texts
(222). Ross says of these:
“Such statements are of notable historical significance, for they suggest
how pedagogical practice was being redefined in radical ways during the
period” (223). Eventually,
schools (particularly universities) became the canon-makers (223-24). Teaching literature in schools led to
the shift of emphasis from elocution to interpretation (224). In addition, teaching literature,
literature “ was turned into an object to study, to be valued less as a
mode of symbolic exchange than as a type of moral technology that could enrich
students by virtue of the labor required to understand and appreciate it”
(226-27).
By
the 1770s, Adam Smith saw literature as a means of improving students’
“style and conduct” (227).
Hugh Blair said literature could “embellish his [the student’s]
mind and supply him with entertainment” and help the student
“arrive at a much more desirable state of self-knowledge” which
could become his moral foundation (228).
Another rationale for teaching literature at the time claimed that
“the cultural capital that the student could earn from such professional
training in critical understanding was felt to be highly desirable and widely
enabling, perhaps more so than any other kind of skill, precisely because it
did not determine the student for any particular interest” (229).
As
literature became something to be studied, the commercially profitable
contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare were popular, but lost “cultural
legitimacy” as Shakespeare came to be seen as a canonical author whose
work should be studied and interpreted rather than simply enjoyed (246). The first academic program in English
literature was established at the University of London in 1828.
Chapter 7:
A Basis for Criticism
Alexander
Baumgarten brought the term “aesthetics” into critical discourse in
1735 (247). David Ruhnken used the
term “canon” to mean a selected group of works in 1768 (247). These instances provide evidence that the
18th century “inaugurated the formation of the English literary
canon” (247). Also in the
18th century, literary history emerged as a discipline, marked by Samuel
Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1779) and Thomas Warton’s History
of English Poetry (1774).
Lawrence Lipking claimed in 1970: “What the public demanded, and
what it eventually received, was a history of English poetry, or a survey of
English poets, that would provide a basis for criticism by reviewing the entire
range of the art. Warton and
Johnson responded to a national desire for an evaluation of what the English
poets had achieved . . . English literary history was shaped by the need for a
definition of the superiority of the national character” (247). However, Ross points out that as he
proved in this book, “a notion of canonicity” was part of British
culture long before this point (248).
As
ideas regarding the function of literature changed, so did the canon criteria
and thus the canon (249). The
early canon was seen as inconsistent and in the 18th century, a set of absolute
standards was sought; aesthetic experience, artistic creativity, and
tastefulness were possibilities (249).
Some critics created scales by which to judge and classify poets, though
even these critics recognized that taste was subjective (253). The goal of critics in this century
became to propose refined and informed judgments (256).
Ross
uses the critics Joseph Warton, Thomas Warton, and Samuel Johnson as examples
of critics’ attempts to develop objective criteria while battling the
inevitable knowledge of relativism.