The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea

(Hardback)

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This book is part of a series which moves the canon debate of the 1980s forward into a new multidisciplinary and cross-cultural phase by investigating problems of canon formation across the whole humanistic field. Some volumes explore the linguistic, political or anthropological dimensions of canonicity. Others examine the historical canons of individual disciplines. The important contribution to the canon debate is remarkable in examining the actual process of canon formation from three unusual and complementary angles. The first two chapters discuss historical attitudes to canons from antiquity onwards, showing the religious, aesthetic, cultural and political interests which have shaped our modern critical canons. Each of the four succeeding chapters examines an exemplary modern defendant, interpreter, or critic of canons: Ernst Gombrich, Northrop Frye, Frank Kermode, and Edward Said. A final chapter considers the origins and rationale of the contemporary debate, emphasizing the disciplinary and aesthetic problems we must confront if our cultural institutions are to meet the changing needs of the next century.

Reviews

A first-rate book, written with impressive analytical power. * Journal of British Studies *
Although the American debate about the canon in 1991 did not end there, thanks to Horak's book, the Russian reader can get a very vivid idea of The most important theories of the canon of the second half of the 20th century, which are still little known and unclaimed in Russia. * Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie (Bloomsbury Translation) *

Author Bio

Professor Jan Gorak teaches at he University of Denver. His publications include God the Artist (1987), Critic of Crisis (1987) and The Alien Mind of Raymond Williams (1988).