Introduction: Thirty Years after Cultural Capital

Abstract

Abstract This essay considers the status of John Guillory's Cultural Capital thirty years after its publication. Responding to an ongoing crisis in the humanities (which seems never to have passed) and to the “canon wars” of literary studies in the 1980s and 1990s, Cultural Capital refocused the debate about literary canons and aesthetic value away from contests of judgment in order to describe the social and institutional contexts of canon formation. What emerges from Guillory's Bourdieusian framework is a brilliant account not only of the process of canon formation but also of the professional anxieties that attend arguments about canonicity and representation. The essay explores the structure of Guillory's argument and considers why this work has been largely absent in recent debates about the state of the profession and the discipline of literary studies. The essay then introduces each contribution to this special issue, which seeks to bring Guillory's theory of canon formation back into contemporary debates about the future of literary studies, the politics of cultural representation, and the state of the humanities in crisis.