Value: criticism, canons, and evaluation

Abstract

Abstract Since the eighteenth century, critical debates about the value of individual writers and literary texts have been underpinned by a philosophical concern with the more fundamental problem of whether objective grounds may be established for aesthetic judgements. Within contemporary literary studies, however, the focus of debate has shifted away from considerations of aesthetic value per se to a much more anxious and conflicted engagement with the perception of canon formation as an arena for the exercise of political power and social exclusion. Whereas eighteenth-century critics might (if erroneously) assume a common culture of ‘taste’, contemporary controversies reflect a sense of the pluralism and fragmentariness of culture and a concomitant concern with the retrieval or construction of cultural unities.