The Emergence of "Literature": Making and Reading the English Canon in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

The idea of literature, has often been noted, is of relatively recent emergence. In Foucault's version of the claim, the idea was born of a radical realignment of the disciplines of knowledge, a realignment that, by the nineteenth century, had left a space for the pure act of to curve back upon itself and to reconstitute itself as an independent form of that we now call 'literature'. 1 We have learned to question this notion of literature's autonomous purity; my interest here is with the historical argument. That the modern sense of has not been in the Western world for long should not be taken to mean that before the nineteenth century the word itself had not been around nor that there was no collective term for identifying the peculiar form of language of writings that we would now consider literary. Yet a change did occur: something happened in the late eighteenth century to the way works of art were valued. No longer considered rhetorical or didactic instruments, they became prized as autonomous creations. In Northrop Frye's formulation: nearly every work of art in the past had a social function in its own time, a function which was often not primarily an aesthetic function at all. The whole conception of 'works of art' as a classification for all pictures, statues, poems, and musical compositions is a relatively modern one. Frye does not explain the change he is describing, though such an explanation is nonetheless implicit in something Frye suggests in his preceding paragraph. Defending humanist culture, Frye writes: it is the consumer, not the producer, who benefits by culture, the consumer who becomes humanized and liberally educated. 2 Arguably, is this assumption that is the relatively modern conception, the one that brought about such concepts as literature and the aesthetic. I wish to suggest that the emergence of literature in its modern sense reflects such a change in how literary value was perceived, a change from production to consumption, invention to reception, writing to reading. [End Page 397]