Literary Canon Research Articles

Canon y Premio Nobel: un estado de la cuestión

This paper poses the following question: as a world institutional award, what is the influence of the Nobel Prize in Literature over the construction of the global canon? To answer it, we start from previous resea rch and analyze the studies on canon and Nobel Prize published in scientific journals indexed in the two main international databases: Web of Science, by Clarivate Analytics, and Scopus, by Elsevier, since both cover the current scientific production. After reading the articles which are relevant for the research objective, the centres of interest of this critical literature can be grouped into three large blocks: the concept of World Literature and its relationship with the Nobel Prize; the canonical characteristics of the works by Nobel Prize winners, and the influence of Nobel Prize in the process of creating the world canon. The conclusions question the monolithic and monumental character of the literary canon and advocate for a more transparent approach to its construction that considers economic and ideological aspects (beyond the formal or artistic value of the texts) as crucial for understanding its nature and evolution. For example, E. Lameborshi’s concept of ideological fluency and R. Walkowitz’s born translated novels are useful for understanding to what extent the common concepts of World Literature and canon have recently been redefined.

The Evolution of Modern Literary Criticism From Structuralism to Postmodernism: A Case Study of Edward Said and His Critique of Orientalism in Literature

The study aimed to examine the development of literary criticism throughout its history from structuralism to postmodernism, using Edward Said's criticism of Orientalism as a case study. A discourse-grounded analysis approach was used to analyze critical texts and articles related to this development. The results showed, according to Said, that the traditional Western depiction of the East is biased and based on power relations, which influenced postcolonial philosophy and the literary canon (Smith, 2018). Said sought to expose biases in Western literature’s depiction of the East (Jones, 2016). His writings have sparked debate about the role of the critic in shaping literary discourse, shifting critical focus toward questions of power, representation, and identity, and increasing opportunities for underrepresented groups to have their voices heard (Brown & Johnson, 2019). Said's critique of Orientalism has influenced contemporary literary criticism, opening the door to a more diverse and comprehensive literary study (Garcia & Lee, 2020).

Ancient Greek and Roman Crip Lit

Abstract: The study of disability in the ancient world is a burgeoning field and is rapidly garnering interest outside of academia, as well. This brief article argues that we can expand our engagement with the topic—and with ancient literature broadly—by acknowledging the disabled status of some Greek and Roman authors, many of whom are mainstays of our traditional literary canon. Disability-informed approaches to themes like embodiment and phenomenology can contribute to a more complex and grounded under-standing of ancient life and experience, as well as deepen our understanding of topics like Stoic philosophy, ancient temporalities, Greek tragedy and the discourse of disability in the ancient world.

Les Metamorphoses d’Apulée. 2. Destructuration anarchétypale du roman

Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. 2. Anarchetypal Freedom of the Novel. In this paper I apply a concept I have coined and defined—the anarchetype—to the ancient Greek and Latin novel, more specifically to Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. The text suffers, in my view, from the tension between two contrary formal tendencies, one which is archetypal, another which is anarchetypal. In a paper published in the previous issue of this journal, I have analyzed the first structural constraint, the archetypal one. In the present paper I focus on the anarchetypal tendency of the novel. Apuleius’ assumed intention of writing an entertaining text, in the wake of the “Milesian tales”, offers him the opportunity to treat freely the epic material, with no regards to Aristotle’s principles and to the canon of high literature. The haphazard fragmentation of the linear narrative and the plethora of additional stories give the text the aspect of an anarchetypal rhizome-like domino game. Keywords: Greek and Latin novel, Apuleius, The Metamorphoses, mystery cults, initiation travel, archetype, anarchetype

LETTERATURA ITALIANA E COSTRUZIONE DELL’IDENTITÀ NAZIONALE NELL’OTTOCENTO

In this article we are commenting the weak points of the Italian literary canon built during the 19th century, which was, at that time, linked to the legitimating of national identity and independence. The idea that an Italian literary canon existed, even in the absence of a national state, had been discussed by Foscolo, Nievo, and Leopardi, and became a central point in Francesco de Sanctis’ History of Italian Literature. De Sanctis describes the evolution of Italian literature seen as a coherent pattern, starting with the Middle Ages and Dante Aligheri who is presented as a national poet. But this type of conception reduces the complexity and variety of regional and local cultures, like for example the poems in roman dialect by Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, and completely ignores women writers, such as, for example, Cristina Trivulzio.

Science Fiction in the Post-occupation Iraqi Short Story in English Translation

English translations of Arabic literary works have interacted with -and possibly influenced- the Western context of science fiction literature. This thesis investigates how the English translations of post-occupation Iraqi short stories possibly contributed to the evolution of the Western science fiction genre. The study seeks to explain the relationship between post-2003 Iraqi literary works -that are a diverse range of corpus- as well as the possible influence of their translations and their counterparts in Anglophone literary systems. The research particularly focuses on Iraq +100 and The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq by Hassan Blasim. Blasim’s edited anthology, Iraq +100, is a prominent element in this study as it is analyzed to illustrate the interrelation between Arabic science fiction and Western traditions of this genre of fiction. As the roles of this edited anthology and short story collection are addressed and discussed in terms of the interaction between Anglophone and Arab literary systems, the study discusses the science fiction theories of Thomas Lombardo (2006) and Darko Suvin (2010). The primary objective of this study is to analyze the two selected books as they are introduced to the Western world and scrutinize how these books can be considered as a response to the evolution of the science fiction genre. Moreover, the translated works of post-occupation Iraqi short stories deal with the political and social impacts of the situation in Iraq after 2003. This thesis follows up by proposing that the anthologized English translations of these Arabic post-occupation Iraqi texts have contributed to the making of a dialogue between Arab and Western cultural and literary canons as well as traditions. The study also analyzes the short stories of the Iraqi writers, as illustrative of a specific expression of post-2003 Iraqi fiction that depicts the terror of violence in Iraq by delivering scenes of excessive violence in their texts. All in all, this study appears as an interdisciplinary work as it engages with translation studies, literary studies, history, and in a way, political science.

EASSESSING ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING’S DIALOGUE WITH FRIEDRICH SCHILLER IN “THE DEAD PAN”

Widely interpreted as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s justification for incorporating Christian themes within poetic discourse, “The Dead Pan” offers a Christian perspective in response to Friedrich Schiller’s favourable portrayal of Ancient Greek paganism in “Gods of Greece.” The poem epitomises Victorian pietism, exemplifying the period’s religious fervour and advocating for the synthesis of Christian content in poetry to enrich the literary canon. This advocacy originates from Browning’s belief that Christianity offers superior truths and values compared to Greek paganism. However, this study proposes a reassessment of Barrett Browning’s interpretation of Schiller’s work, suggesting that she may have misconstrued his allusions to Greek mythology as a straightforward endorsement of paganism. It is crucial to recognise that Schiller’s critique of Christianity primarily condemns the exploitation of the faith by religious and secular authorities to oppress and control the populace, rather than an outright denunciation of the religion itself. By examining the genesis of “The Dead Pan” through Barrett Browning’s personal correspondence, this study illuminates her specific objectives and her responses to Schiller’s perspectives. Additionally, by contextualising “Gods of Greece” within its socio-political and theological framework, this paper demonstrates that while Browning and Schiller have divergent approaches to Ancient Greek culture and Christianity, Barrett Browning overlooks Schiller’s nuanced criticism of the misuse of religion by religious and secular authorities.

‘I sing to you / from my place with my righteous kin’: Judith Wright’s decolonial poetics

ABSTRACT Widely celebrated as one of the most influential twentieth-century Australian poets, Judith Wright occupies a central and uncontested space in the national literary canon. The political drive of her poetry, intertwined with her lifelong commitment to ecological and Indigenous rights activism, transformed the platform afforded her as a ‘poet of the land’ into a discursive space through which to contest the legitimacy of her own positioning – as a settler, as a poet, and perhaps most significantly as an anticolonial ally. Despite this, and despite the growing urgency of conversations about institutional decolonization, Wright’s complex legacy as a decolonial agent remains largely uncontested. This article considers Wright’s poetic capacity to strike at the foundation upon which she stands and to excavate the violent histories beneath it; however, it also illuminates the inherited literary traditions that stunt her disruptive efforts. Drawing her contribution as a writer-activist into broader reflections on decolonization, I demonstrate the lasting significance of Wright’s reparative gestures – acknowledging and attending to active silences – as a timely model for literary canon reformation. Such (re)considerations of Wright’s legacy raise pertinent questions about what constitutes decolonial literary activism and gesture towards the silences as yet unbroken by the broader decolonial project.

Influences of the Literary Canon: Statistical Analysis of High School Reading Lists in the Czech Republic

This study focuses on the analysis of the school lists of literary works for the graduation exam, which were published for the exam in the school year 2019/2020. The aim of this pilot study is to determine if there is a relation between school lists and the state-certified list, which is also a determining factor for the graduation exam in the Czech language and literaure. Questions regarding the influence of the school list on the success rate of the graduation exam or the relation between the type of school and the size of the list and the graduation exam are also discussed. We analyze the lists from 72 schools from the South Moravian Region in the Czech Republic. In total, we are dealing with 7 551 items, on which the correlation analysis, regression analysis and cluster analysis are applied.

The Booksellers' School and the Rise of American Independent Bookselling

Abstract: This article analyzes the concerns and activities of the B.W. Huebsch-led Booksellers' School in New York City (1912–1918) to argue how certain fundamentals of bookselling met with a strong emphasis on a national (American) literature, partly through a series of lectures run by Van Wyck Brooks. The School sought to educate sellers in national canons of literature and help them sell the fledgling American one. In bringing together the profession of bookselling and literariness, the Booksellers' School offered a blueprint for a new form of bookselling—one which embraced an idea of literariness as a commercial tactic. By addressing the ideas on bookselling and American literature Huebsch and Brooks forwarded at the School, I show the potential influence it had on the bookselling landscape in the early twentieth century.

Guimerà: la persistència d’un mite popular i els debats al voltant del cinquantenari de la seva mort (1909–1974)

Few authors are able to represent and exemplify in life the continuity between national literary canon and territorial identity as well as Àngel Guimerà i Jorge (1845–1924). This article sets out to trace the continuities and permanence in Catalan culture of the figure of Guimerà, but at the same to highlight the contrasting or contradictory elements that have characterized public evaluations of his legacy. Beginning with brief consideration of the monumentalization of Guimerà in the early 20th century and immediately following his death in 1924, we will go on to focus on debates around his significance towards the end of the Franco dictatorship, as it was then that new generations of intellectuals and artists who had not directly experienced the civil war would consider the continuing relevance or validity of his writings. This process culminated in 1974 on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his death: when there was open debate in the press about the place of Guimerà in Catalan culture, and, more specifically, on the Catalan stage. Here we aim to contextualise these debates, elucidating both the challenges presented by different aspects of his figure and work for recovery in the Catalan society of the period and the light they shed on the ways in which literary figures are resignified over time.

Exploring Self-Reflexivity in Selected Dalit Literatures

Dalit literature, which emerged prominently in the 1970s and 1980s, represents a significant shift in Indian literary and cultural discourse. It is deeply connected to the Dalit Panther Movement in Maharashtra, which sought to confront and challenge entrenched caste hierarchies and social injustices. Historically, Indian literature has been dominated by upper-caste perspectives, which marginalized lower-caste voices and reinforced existing social structures. Dalit literature disrupts this hegemony by foregrounding the experiences of those historically marginalized, challenging traditional literary canons that glorify upper-caste perspectives and advocating for a redefined cultural legitimacy. Self-reflexivity, a process of critical self-examination within social contexts, plays a crucial role in Dalit writings. It involves reflecting on one’s identity and its formation within oppressive socio-cultural frameworks. Dalit literature often explores the interplay between spatial identity and caste discrimination, emphasizing how physical and social spaces are laden with historical and cultural meanings. This reflexivity enables Dalit writers to question and reconfigure their identities in response to systemic inequalities. Historically, Dalit writings can trace their roots back to Vedic traditions that justified caste hierarchies. Figures like Sharankumar Limbale and Eleanor Zelliot highlight how Dalit literature is a counter-narrative to these oppressive traditions. Early Dalit writers, influenced by social reformers like B.R. Ambedkar and movements such as Bhakti, used their works to critique caste-based injustices and advocate for social change. Education has been a transformative force in Dalit autobiographies, serving as a means for personal and societal advancement. Despite historical resistance to the education of untouchables, British colonial reforms and missionary schools played a pivotal role in improving educational access. Figures like Jyotiba Phule further advanced educational opportunities for marginalized communities, challenging entrenched social norms and promoting empowerment through learning.

Somewhere between the Nahḍa and the Nadal: toward a rhizomatic cartography of Hispanophone Moroccan literature

The great variety of Hispanophone Moroccan literature evades facile categorization and breaks down identity qualifiers. It exists, yet it refuses to be easily categorized: is it a Moroccan literature that just happens to be expressed in Spanish? Or is it a peripheral Spanish literature that has grown out of the historical proximity and connections between the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghreb? This long, shared history complicates a simple description of these works as “postcolonial literature,” and suggests what Deleuze and Guattari call a rhizomatic literary cartography. This project seeks to engage with these questions of literary identity in Hispanophone Moroccan literature in order to consider the competing factors contributing to this unique literary phenomenon. My thesis is that Hispanophone Moroccan literature must be understood as a rhizomatic cartography. If it is considered as a peripheral Spanish or postcolonial literature, we risk overlooking many of its valuable contributions to the Hispanophone literary canon.

A. N. Radishchev as an "archaist and innovator": linguopoetic and linguostylistic features of the great book (to the 275th anniversary of the birth)

The article considers the most important linguopoetic and linguostylistic characteristics of A. N. Radishchev’s "A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow". The research also focuses on the precedent phenomena in the text of the book, its connections with the European artistic tradition, and influence on the Russian literary language evolution, as well as on particular genres of Russian literature. The text is examined against the background of the dominant literary canons of sentimentalism at the time of its writing; the author creatively mastered some of these canons. Radishchev developed his individual style which synthesised three main linguistic elements: emotional-sensual, civic rhetorical, and common colloquial. Each of them is characterised by a certain set of linguistic means that are compositionally anchored in the text. The figurative devices of classicistic poetics, tropeic expressiveness, refined linguistic expressions borrowed from Western literature, and vocabulary new for the late 18th century form the compositional parts characteristic of the journey as a distinct literary genre. A. N. Radishchev uses Slavicisms, archaic morphological forms and obsolete syntactic constructions, neologisms based on Church Slavonic patterns to create high civic pathos and embody freedom-loving ideas. Low colloquial speech, folk phraseology, folklore inserts, aphorisms, and mixtures of styles shape the author’s narrative fragments and reflections related to specific life situations.

Will the ‘Real Reader’ Please Stand Up? ‘Bookishness’ in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines

This essay examines the palpable presence of books and the printed word in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988) and its entwinement with the brief, “bookish” life of the character Tridib, who plays a pivotal role in the narrative. It draws upon a phrase from Amitav Ghosh’s oeuvre–the “real reader”–to explore the idealized figure of the reader and storyteller embodied by Tridib. This idealized figure, as this essay highlights, has a history stretching back to the early days of print in colonial India, and important antecedents in the modern Bengali literary canon. It is also a figure constituted by material dimensions of book-ownership and by dominant ideologies on the cultural value of book-owning and reading. What does the tale of the “bookish” storyteller stand for in the postcolonial context, in a narrative that holds his readerly qualities in the highest esteem?

Re-mediating The Female American: Collaboration and Situated Knowledges in the Digital Humanities Classroom

ABSTRACT The Female American, published pseudonymously in 1767, has drawn scholarly attention in recent decades as a novel that raises questions about anonymity, gender, authorship, Indigeneity, settler colonialism, and the American literary canon. Yet access to the text has remained limited, dependent on subscription databases and print scholarly editions. In 2022, as part of a graduate seminar on eighteenth-century literature, science, and colonialism, we produced the first open-access digital edition of volume 1; a subset of the class also recorded a public domain audiobook of the full novel. This article presents an account of our process and the connections drawn between these projects and course content, with attention to conversations and tensions that arose as we drafted a land acknowledgment for the edition. Moving beyond the “how we built this” genre common in digital humanities, this article offers a critical reflection on the ways our individual interests, identities, commitments, and institutional embeddedness shaped the knowledge we could cocreate. Our aim is to demonstrate that the benefits of digital pedagogy extend far beyond technical skill-building—especially in graduate education, where digital projects provide an opportunity for emerging scholars to reflect critically on material and social entanglements that conventional humanities workflows often obscure.

Writing the Self: Identity Formation in Dalit Women’s Life Writings

The formation of self in Dalit women’s writings is a historical process which is based on their lived experiences, centuries of suffering and resistance against the atrocities meted out on them because of untouchability and being women. They depict their struggle for survival and protest through the experiences from their daily lives of poverty, hunger, humiliation and exploitation. Uniquely, Dalit women’s ‘Self’ stands for individual identity as well as the collective identity of the community they belong to. At the intersection of class, caste and gender they are considered as ‘Dalit among Dalits’. In the pages of history, they remained neglected and suffered the ‘triple’ subjugation of caste, class and gender. Presently, they have embarked their self-identity on the literary canon through their life writings as resistance against their subordination – both caste and patriarchy. Their writings are mostly in form of autobiographies, biographies, memoirs and autobiographical fiction and most of them have been written in regional languages which lead to the formation of Dalit ‘Self’. Recently, a few Dalit women’s writings have been translated into English and have got access to the wider range of readers. These translated works, though few in number, have paved ways for Dalit women’s formation of self and have succeeded in establishing a standpoint for themselves – a Dalit Feminist Standpoint. Taking up the analysis of three groundbreaking Dalit women’s autobiographies namely The Prisons We Broke by Baby Kamble, The Weave of My Life by Urmila Pawar and Karukku by Bama, the focus of the paper centers around Dalit women’s suffering and how they successfully combat the hegemony of their oppressors and formed a separate branch of identity for themselves on the literary canon as Dalit feminism.

Miroslav Válek: Three Stages of Canonicity

The article focuses on the seminal Slovak poet Miroslav Válek (1927–1991) and his place in the Slovak literary canon. It reconstructs Válek’s literary trajectory, from being a poet of individualist and intimate verse who entered Slovak literature during the political thaw and liberalisation, as an important voice of the generation, to a poet who inclined towards long associative poems with political overtones, culminating in his controversial book-length poem in the 1970s, during his no less controversial time as minister of culture of the Slovak Socialist Republic. Based on the critical reception and publishing history of Válek’s poetry, the paper pays attention to shifts and ambiguities in the poet’s position in both the socialist and post-socialist literary canons. Despite certain fluctuations, the basis of his image remains the same, rooted in his own poetic programme, which coincided with the preferred image of a poet’s work at the time: Válek was and remains both a poet and a politician, a poet of inner turmoil, and a poet of social and political being. The difference the paper attempts to describe is that the socialist literary canon did not differentiate between these extremes (at least in official literary criticism), whereas the Slovak post-socialist canon, which is generally sceptical towards political tones in art, makes the distinction clearly.

The Margins versus the Centre of the National Literary Canon: The Reception of ‘The Legend of Master Manole’ in Romanian Education

The main purpose of the article is to outline a panorama of the reception of ‘The Legend of Master Manole’ in Romanian education, from the beginning of its introduction to the Romanian national literary canon until the post-communist era. The paper explores how the discourse created around this text in the 19th century and perpetuated by interwar critics (e.g. George Călinescu, Mircea Eliade), and the ideology of protochronism during Ceaușescu’s regime, is preserved in post-communist textbooks. Although there have been some attempts at the feminist decanonisation of the ballad since 1989, they did not influence the main narrative presented in school manuals. The didactic literature still emphasises the male perspective of Manole, and his sacrifice for the act of creation, ignoring the perspective of Ana, the female character in the ballad, and her sacrifice. Starting from the premise that the canon is a certain set of beliefs which can be constantly engaged in polemics that should be continuously shaped and deconstructed, the article also proposes some new literary contexts in which ‘The Legend of Master Manole’ could appear in school textbooks.

Ann Yearsley and the Poetics and Politics of Breastfeeding

ABSTRACT This article argues that Ann Yearsley, a milkwoman, mother, and poet, not yet fully recovered into the British literary canon, challenges stereotypical representations of breastfeeding mothers created and perpetuated primarily by male authors in Romantic poetry, philosophy, and medical discourse. Her poem “To Mira, on the Care of Her Infant” depicts breastfeeding as a complex labor that requires skill, intelligence, empathy, and discipline. In this poem, Yearsley rejects the arguments of Romantic writers such as William Wordsworth, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and William Cadogan, who depict nursing mothers as passive vessels of milk or substitutes for a nurturing “mother nature.” I further locate Yearsley in rich networks of subscribers, printers, and periodicals adjacent to canon authors and texts. Thinking particularly about the conventions of epic and georgic forms, and their relationship to nationalism, labor, and motherhood, I ultimately show how Yearsley recasts the nursing mother as a subject rather than an object.