What guided American elites in establishing a canon of great cultural achievements? Precedent and custom.
As this New York Times article points out, canons have traditionally been determined by “an elite group of scholars and critics who embraced a work of art and sent it aloft to some deifying realm.”
Harold BloomThe Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages / AuthorHarold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was described as "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world." Wikipedia
In The Western Canon Bloom lists "the major Western writers" as Dante Aligheri, Geoffrey Chaucer, Miguel de Cervantes, Michel de Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust.
The canonical form of English literary history emerged as a reversal of an earlier understanding of cultural change. This reversal oc- curred amid a transformative tension between allegedly high-cultural and mass-cultural works and between the social worlds they were taken to emblematize.
The term “literary canon” refers to a body of books, narratives and other texts considered to be the most important and influential of a particular time period or place. Take a 19th century American literature course, for instance.
Harold Bloom, (born July 11, 1930, Bronx, New York, U.S.—died October 14, 2019, New Haven, Connecticut), American literary critic known for his innovative interpretations of literary history and of the creation of literature. Bloom's first language was Yiddish, and he also learned Hebrew before English.
Why is literary canon important? The literary canon serves as an important standard for determining the quality and long-term value of any given work. Even texts and writers who are not specifically considered canonical are measured against the broader canon for determining their literary value.
Every literate culture has a canon; Japan, India, New Guinea, Norway, China, Germany, Russia, etc., each has a national heritage of texts (novels, epic poems, plays, stories, biographies and autobiographies, sermons, histories) it publicly esteems and preserves. Yet, a canon need not be made up of national texts alone.
In religious terms, a canon is a standard of judgment or a text containing those views, such as the Bible or the Koran. Sometimes within religious traditions, as views evolve or change, some formerly canonical texts become "apocryphal," meaning outside the realm of what's considered representative.
In literature, the term "canon" is used to distinguish between the original works of a writer who created certain characters and/or settings, and the later works of other writers who took up the same characters or setting.
On July 21, millions of children and adults will likely experience a blend of exhilaration and sadness as they delve into Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final installment in the series by J. K. Rowling.