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TheWestern canon is the embodiment ofhigh-culture literature, music, philosophy, and works of art that are highly cherished across theWestern world, such works having achieved the status ofclassics.
Recent discussions upon the matter emphasise cultural diversity within the canon.[1][2] The canons of music and visual arts have been broadened to encompass often overlooked periods, whilst recent media like cinema grapple with a precarious position. Criticism arises, with some viewing changes as prioritisingactivism over aesthetic values, often associated with critical theory, as well aspostmodernism.[3] Another critique highlights a narrow interpretation of the West, dominated by British and American culture, at least under contemporary circumstances, prompting demands for a more diversified canon amongst the hemisphere.[3]
There is no official list of works that a recognized panel of experts or scholars agreed upon that is "the Western Canon," nor has there ever been such. A corpus of great works is an idea that has been discussed, negotiated, and criticized for the past century.
Aclassic is a book, or any other work of art, accepted as being exemplary or noteworthy. In the second-centuryRomanmiscellanyAttic Nights,Aulus Gellius refers to writers as "classicus... scriptor, non proletarius" ("A distinguished, not a commonplace writer").[4] Such classification were initiated with the Greeks'ranking their cultural works, with the wordcanon (ancient Greek κανών, kanṓn: "measuring rod, standard").[5] Similarly, earlyChristian Church Fathersdeclared ascanon the authoritative texts of theNew Testament, preserving them given the expense ofvellum andpapyrus and mechanical book reproduction. Thus, being included in acanon ensured a book's preservation as the best way to retain information about a civilization. In contemporary use, the Western canon defines the best ofWestern culture. In the ancient world, at theAlexandrian Library, scholars coined the Greek termHoi enkrithentes ["the admitted", "the included"] to identify the writers in the canon. Although the term is often associated with the Western canon, it can be applied to works of literature, music and art, etc. from all traditions, such as theChinese classics.
With regard to books, what makes a book "classic" has concerned various authors, fromMark Twain toItalo Calvino, and questions such as "Why Read the Classics?", and "What Is a Classic?" have been considered by others, includingT. S. Eliot,Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve,Michael Dirda, andEzra Pound.
The terms "classic book" and Western canon are closely related concepts, but are not necessarily synonymous. A "canon" is a list of books considered to be "essential", and it can be published as a collection (such asGreat Books of the Western World,Modern Library,Everyman's Library orPenguin Classics), presented as a list with an academic's imprimatur (such asHarold Bloom's[6]), or be the official reading list of a university. InThe Western Canon Bloom lists "the major Western writers" asDante Alighieri,Geoffrey Chaucer,Miguel de Cervantes,Michel de Montaigne,William Shakespeare,Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,William Wordsworth,Charles Dickens,Leo Tolstoy,James Joyce andMarcel Proust.
A university or collegeGreat Books Program is a program inspired by the Great Books movement begun in the United States in the 1920s byJohn Erskine ofColumbia University, which proposed to improve the higher education system by returning it to the westernliberal arts tradition of broad cross-disciplinary learning. These academics and educators includedRobert Hutchins,Mortimer Adler,Stringfellow Barr,Scott Buchanan,Jacques Barzun, andAlexander Meiklejohn. The view among them was that the emphasis on narrow specialization in American colleges had harmed the quality ofhigher education by failing to expose students to the important products of Western civilization and thought.
The essential component of such programs is a high degree of engagement with primary texts, called the Great Books. The curricula of Great Books programs often follow a canon of texts considered more or less essential to a student's education, such as Plato'sRepublic, or Dante'sDivine Comedy. Such programs often focus exclusively on Western culture. Their employment of primary texts dictates an interdisciplinary approach, as most of the Great Books do not fall neatly under the prerogative of a single contemporary academic discipline. Great Books programs often include designated discussion groups as well as lectures, and have small class sizes. In general students in such programs receive an abnormally high degree of attention from their professors, as part of the overall aim of fostering a community of learning.
Over 100 institutions of higher learning, mostly in the United States, offer some version of a Great Books Program as an option for students.[7]
For much of the 20th century, theModern Library provided a larger convenient list of the Western canon.[8] The list numbered more than 300 items by the 1950s, by authors from Aristotle to Albert Camus, and has continued to grow. When in the 1990s the concept of the Western canon was vehemently condemned, just as earlier Modern Library lists had been criticized as "too American," Modern Library responded by preparing new lists of "100 Best Novels" and "100 Best Nonfiction" compiled by famous writers, and later compiled lists nominated by book purchasers and readers.[9]
Some intellectuals have championed a "high conservative modernism" that insists that universal truths exist, and have opposed approaches that deny the existence of universal truths.[10]Yale University Professor of Humanities and famous literary criticHarold Bloom also argued strongly in favor of the canon, in his 1994 bookThe Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, and in general the canon remains as a represented idea in many institutions.[11]Allan Bloom (no relation), in his highly influentialThe Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (1987), argues that moral degradation results from ignorance of the greatclassics that shaped Western culture. Bloom further comments: "But one thing is certain: wherever the Great Books make up a central part of the curriculum, the students are excited and satisfied."[12] His book was widely cited by some intellectuals for its argument that the classics contained universal truths and timeless values which were being ignored bycultural relativists.[13][14]
ClassicistBernard Knox made direct reference to this topic when he delivered his 1992Jefferson Lecture (the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in thehumanities).[15] Knox used the intentionally "provocative" title "The Oldest Dead White European Males"[16] as the title of his lecture and his subsequent book of the same name, in both of which Knox defended the continuing relevance ofclassical culture to modern society.[17][18]
Defenders maintain that those who undermine the canon do so out of primarily political interests, and that such criticisms are misguided and/or disingenuous. AsJohn Searle, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, has written:
There is a certain irony in this [i.e., politicized objections to the canon] in that earlier student generations, my own for example, found the critical tradition that runs fromSocrates through theFederalist Papers, through the writings ofMill andMarx, down to the twentieth century, to be liberating from the stuffy conventions of traditional American politics and pieties. Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude, the "canon" served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. Ironically, the same tradition is now regarded as oppressive. The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked.[11]
One of the main objections to a canon of literature is the question of authority; who should have the power to determine what works are worth reading?
Charles Altieri, of theUniversity of California, Berkeley, states that canons are "an institutional form for exposing people to a range of idealized attitudes." It is according to this notion that work may be removed from the canon over time to reflect the contextual relevance and thoughts of society.[19] American historianTodd M. Compton argues that canons are always communal in nature; that there are limited canons for, say a literature survey class, or an English department reading list, but there is no such thing as one absolute canon of literature. Instead, there are many conflicting canons. He regards Bloom's "Western Canon" as a personal canon only.[20]
The process of defining the boundaries of the canon is endless. The philosopherJohn Searle has said, "In my experience there never was, in fact, a fixed 'canon'; there was rather a certain set of tentative judgments about what had importance and quality. Such judgments are always subject to revision, and in fact they were constantly being revised."[11] One of the notable attempts at compiling an authoritative canon for literature in the English-speaking world was theGreat Books of the Western World program. This program, developed in the middle third of the 20th century, grew out of the curriculum at theUniversity of Chicago. University presidentRobert Maynard Hutchins and his collaboratorMortimer Adler developed a program that offered reading lists, books, and organizational strategies for reading clubs to the general public.[21][22][23] An earlier attempt had been made in 1909 byHarvard University presidentCharles W. Eliot, with theHarvard Classics, a 51-volume anthology of classic works from world literature. Eliot's view was the same as that of Scottish philosopher and historianThomas Carlyle: "The true University of these days is a Collection of Books". ("The Hero as Man of Letters", 1840)
The canon of Renaissance English poetry of the 16th and early 17th century has always been in some form of flux and towards the end of the 20th century the established canon was criticised, especially by those who wished to expand it to include, for example, more women writers.[24] However, the central figures of the British renaissance canon remain,Edmund Spenser, SirPhilip Sidney,Christopher Marlowe,William Shakespeare,Ben Jonson, andJohn Donne.[25]Spenser,Donne, andJonson were major influences on 17th-century poetry. However, poetJohn Dryden condemned aspects of the metaphysical poets in his criticism. In the 18th centuryMetaphysical poetry fell into further disrepute,[26] while the interest inElizabethan poetry was rekindled through the scholarship ofThomas Warton and others. However, the canon of Renaissance poetry was formed in the Victorian period with anthologies like Palgrave'sGolden Treasury.[27]
In the twentieth centuryT. S. Eliot andYvor Winters were two literary critics who were especially concerned with revising the canon of renaissance English literature. Eliot, for example, championed poetSir John Davies in an article inThe Times Literary Supplement in 1926. During the course of the 1920s, Eliot did much to establish the importance of the metaphysical school, both through his critical writing and by applying their method in his own work. However, by 1961A. Alvarez was commenting that "it may perhaps be a little late in the day to be writing about the Metaphysicals. The great vogue for Donne passed with the passing of the Anglo-American experimental movement in modern poetry."[28] Two decades later, a hostile view was expressed that emphasis on their importance had been an attempt by Eliot and his followers to impose a 'high Anglican and royalist literary history' on 17th-century English poetry.[29]
The American criticYvor Winters suggested in 1939 an alternative canon ofElizabethan poetry,[30] which would exclude the famous representatives of thePetrarchan school of poetry, represented by SirPhilip Sidney andEdmund Spenser. Winters claimed that the Native or Plain Styleanti-Petrarchan movement had been undervalued and argued thatGeorge Gascoigne (1525–1577) "deserves to be ranked [...] among the six or seven greatest lyric poets of the century, and perhaps higher".[31]
Towards the end of the 20th century the established canon was increasingly disputed.[24]
In the twentieth century there was a general reassessment of theliterary canon, includingwomen's writing,post-colonial literatures,gay and lesbian literature, writing by racialized minorities, working people's writing, and the cultural productions of historically marginalized groups. This reassessment has resulted in a whole scale expansion of what is considered "literature", and genres hitherto not regarded as "literary", such as children's writing, journals, letters, travel writing, and many others are now the subjects of scholarly interest.[32][33][34]
The Western literary canon has also expanded to include the literature of Asia, Africa, theMiddle East, and South America. Writers from Africa, Turkey, China, Egypt, Peru, and Colombia, Japan, etc., have received Nobel prizes since the late 1960s. Writers from Asia and Africa have also been nominated for, and also won, theBooker prize in recent years.
Susan Hardy Aitken argues that the Western canon has maintained itself by excluding and marginalising women, whilst idealising the works of men.[35] Where women's work is introduced it can be considered inappropriately rather than recognising the importance of their work; a work's greatness is judged against socially situated factors which exclude women, whilst being portrayed as an intellectual approach.[36]
The feminist movement produced both feminist fiction and non-fiction and created new interest in women's writing. It also prompted a general reevaluation of women'shistorical and academic contributions in response to the belief that women's lives and contributions have been underrepresented as areas of scholarly interest.[32]
However, in Britain and America at least women achieved major literary success from the late eighteenth century, and many major nineteenth-century British novelists were women, includingJane Austen, theBrontë family,Elizabeth Gaskell, andGeorge Eliot. There were also three major female poets,Elizabeth Barrett Browning,[37]Christina Rossetti andEmily Dickinson.[38][39] In the twentieth century there were also many major female writers, includingKatherine Mansfield,Dorothy Richardson,Virginia Woolf,Eudora Welty, andMarianne Moore. Notable female writers in France includeColette,Simone de Beauvoir,Marguerite Yourcenar,Nathalie Sarraute,Marguerite Duras andFrançoise Sagan.
Much of the early period of feminist literary scholarship was given over to the rediscovery and reclamation of texts written by women.Virago Press began to publish its large list of 19th and early 20th-century novels in 1975 and became one of the first commercial presses to join in the project of reclamation.
In the twentieth century, the Western literary canon started to include African writers not only fromAfrican-American writers, but also from thewider African diaspora of writers in Britain, France, Latin America, and Africa. This correlated largely with the shift in social and political views during thecivil rights movement in the United States. The first global recognition came in 1950 whenGwendolyn Brooks was the first African American to win aPulitzer Prize for Literature. AmericanToni Morrison was the first African-American woman to win theNobel Prize in Literature, in 1993.
Some early African-American writers were inspired to defy ubiquitousracial prejudice by proving themselves equal toEuropean American authors. As Henry Louis Gates Jr., has said, "it is fair to describe the subtext of the history of black letters as this urge to refute the claim that because blacks had no written traditions they were bearers of an inferior culture."[40]
African-American writers were also attempting to subvert the literary and power traditions of the United States. Some scholars assert that writing has traditionally been seen as "something defined by the dominant culture as a white male activity."[40] This means that, in American society, literary acceptance has traditionally been intimately tied in with the very power dynamics which perpetrated such evils as racial discrimination. By borrowing from and incorporating the non-written oral traditions and folk life of theAfrican diaspora, African-American literature broke "the mystique of connection between literary authority andpatriarchal power."[41] In producing their own literature, African Americans were able to establish their own literary traditions devoid of the European intellectual filter. This view of African-American literature as a tool in the struggle for African-American political and cultural liberation has been stated for decades, most famously byW. E. B. Du Bois.[42]
Octavio Paz Lozano (1914–1998) was a Mexican poet and diplomat. For his body of work, he was awarded the 1981Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1982Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the 1990Nobel Prize in Literature.
Gabriel García Márquez[43] (1927–2014) was aColombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, and journalist. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century and one of the best in theSpanish language, he was awarded the 1972Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982Nobel Prize in Literature.[44]
García Márquez started as a journalist, and wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novels, such asOne Hundred Years of Solitude (1967),The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), andLove in the Time of Cholera (1985). His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style labeled asmagic realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations. Some of his works are set in a fictional village calledMacondo (the town mainly inspired by his birthplaceAracataca), and most of them explore the theme ofsolitude. On his death in April 2014,Juan Manuel Santos, the President of Colombia, described him as "the greatest Colombian who ever lived."[45]
Mario Vargas Llosa, (1936-2025)[46] is a Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, essayist, college professor, and recipient of the 2010Nobel Prize in Literature.[47] Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a larger international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of theLatin American Boom.[48] Upon announcing the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, theSwedish Academy said it had been given to Vargas Llosa "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat".[49]
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Manyphilosophers today agree that Greek philosophy has influenced much ofWestern culture since its inception.Alfred North Whitehead once noted: "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes toPlato."[50] Clear, unbroken lines of influence lead fromancient Greek andHellenistic philosophers toEarly Islamic philosophy, the EuropeanRenaissance, and theAge of Enlightenment.[51]
Plato was aphilosopher inClassical Greece and the founder of theAcademy inAthens. He is widely considered the most pivotal figure in the development of philosophy, especially theWestern tradition.[52][53]
Aristotle was anancient Greekphilosopher. His writings cover many subjects – includingphysics,biology,zoology,metaphysics,logic,ethics,aesthetics,rhetoric,linguistics, politics and government—and constitute the first comprehensive system ofWestern philosophy.[54] Aristotle's views onphysical science had a profound influence on medieval scholarship. Their influence extended fromLate Antiquity into theRenaissance, and his views were not replaced systematically untilthe Enlightenment and theories such asclassical mechanics. In metaphysics,Aristotelianism profoundly influencedJudeo-Islamic philosophical and theological thought during theMiddle Ages and continues to influenceChristian theology, especially theNeoplatonism of theEarly Church and thescholastic tradition of theRoman Catholic Church. Aristotle was well known among medieval Muslim intellectuals and revered as "The First Teacher" (Arabic:المعلم الأول). His ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent ofvirtue ethics.
Boethius'On the Consolation of Philosophy (Latin:De consolatione philosophiae) is often acclaimed as a central work fromLate Antiquity, at the cusp of theearly medieval period, that remained influential throughout theMiddle Ages. Of Boethius, it has been said that "[along] withAugustine andAristotle, he isthe fundamental philosophical and theological author in the Latin tradition";[55]Edward Gibbon wrote of theConsolatione that it is "a golden volume not unworthy of the leisure ofPlato orTully",[56] andBertrand Russell wrote that, by merit of the same, Boethius "would have been remarkable in any age; in the age in which he lived he is utterly amazing."[57]
The vast body ofChristian philosophy is typically represented on reading lists mainly byAugustine of Hippo andThomas Aquinas. The academic canon ofearly modern philosophy generally includesDescartes,Spinoza,Leibniz,Locke,Berkeley,Hume, andKant.[58]
Major philosophers of theRenaissance includeNiccolò Machiavelli,Michel de Montaigne,Pico della Mirandola,Nicholas of Cusa andGiordano Bruno,Marsilio Ficino[59] andGemistos Plethon.[60]
The seventeenth century was important for philosophy, and the major figures wereFrancis Bacon,Thomas Hobbes,René Descartes,Blaise Pascal,Baruch Spinoza,John Locke andGottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.[61]
Major philosophers of the eighteenth century includeGeorge Berkeley,Montesquieu,Voltaire,David Hume,Giambattista Vico,[62]Jean-Jacques Rousseau,Denis Diderot,Immanuel Kant,Edmund Burke andJeremy Bentham.[61]
Important nineteenth century philosophers includeGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831),Giuseppe Mazzini,[63]Arthur Schopenhauer,Auguste Comte,Søren Kierkegaard,Karl Marx,Friedrich Engels andFriedrich Nietzsche.
Major twentieth century figures includeHenri Bergson,Edmund Husserl,Bertrand Russell,Martin Heidegger,Ludwig Wittgenstein andJean-Paul Sartre,Simone de Beauvoir, andSimone Weil,Michel Foucault,Pierre Bourdieu,Jacques Derrida andJürgen Habermas. A porous distinction betweenanalytic andcontinental approaches emerged during this period.
Classical music forms the core of canon music and remains mostly unchanged to our days. It integrates a huge body of works starting from the 17th century and are reproduced on an ensemble of all acoustic musical instruments that were common in that century's Europe.
The term "classical music" did not appear until the early 19th century, in an attempt to distinctly canonize the period fromJohann Sebastian Bach toLudwig van Beethoven as a golden age. In addition to Bach and Beethoven, the other major figures from this period wereGeorge Frideric Handel,Joseph Haydn andWolfgang Amadeus Mozart.[64] The earliest reference to "classical music" recorded by theOxford English Dictionary is from about 1836.[65]
Inclassical music, during the nineteenth century a "canon" developed which focused on what was felt to be the most important works written since 1600, with a great concentration on the later part of this period, termed theClassical period, which is generally taken to begin around 1750. After Beethoven, the major nineteenth-century composers includeFelix Mendelssohn,Franz Schubert,Robert Schumann,Frédéric Chopin,Hector Berlioz,Franz Liszt,Richard Wagner,Johannes Brahms,Antonín Dvořák,Anton Bruckner,Giuseppe Verdi,Giacomo Puccini,Camille Saint-Saëns,Gustav Mahler, andPyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.[66]
In the 2000s, the standard concert repertoire of professional orchestras, chamber music groups, and choirs tends to focus on works by a relatively small number of mainly 18th- and 19th-century male composers. Many of the works deemed to be part of the musical canon are from genres regarded as the mostserious, such as thesymphony,concerto,string quartet, andopera.Folk music was already givingart music melodies, and from the late 19th century, in an atmosphere of increasingnationalism, folk music began to influence composers in formal and other ways, before being admitted to some sort of status in the canon itself.
Since the early twentieth centurynon-Western music has begun to influence Western composers. In particular, direct homages toJavanesegamelan music are found in works for western instruments byClaude Debussy,Béla Bartók,Francis Poulenc,Olivier Messiaen,Pierre Boulez,Benjamin Britten,John Cage,Steve Reich, andPhilip Glass.[67] Debussy was immensely interested in non-Western music and its approaches to composition. Specifically, he was drawn to the Javanese gamelan,[68] which he first heard at the1889 Paris Exposition. He was not interested in directly quoting his non-Western influences, but instead allowed this non-Western aesthetic to generally influence his own musical work, for example, by frequently using quiet, unresolved dissonances, coupled with the damper pedal, to emulate the "shimmering" effect created by a gamelan ensemble. American composer Philip Glass was not only influenced by the eminent French composition teacherNadia Boulanger,[69] but also by the Indian musiciansRavi Shankar andAlla Rakha, His distinctive style arose from his work with Shankar and Rakha and their perception of rhythm in Indian music as being entirely additive.[70]
In the latter half of the 20th century the canon expanded to cover the so-calledEarly music of the pre-classical period, andBaroque music by composers other than Bach andGeorge Frideric Handel, includingAntonio Vivaldi,Claudio Monteverdi,Domenico Scarlatti,Alessandro Scarlatti,Henry Purcell,Georg Philipp Telemann,Jean-Baptiste Lully,Jean-Philippe Rameau,Marc-Antoine Charpentier,Arcangelo Corelli,François Couperin,Heinrich Schütz, andDieterich Buxtehude. Earlier composers, such asGiovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina,Orlande de Lassus andWilliam Byrd, have also received more attention in the last hundred years.[71]
The absence of women composers from the classical canon was brought to the forefront of musicological literature in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Even though manywomen composers have written music in the common practice period and beyond, their works remain extremely underrepresented in concert programs, music history curriculums, and music anthologies. In particular, musicologist Marcia J Citron has examined "the practices and attitudes that have led to the exclusion of women composers from the received 'canon' of performed musical works."[72] Since around 1980 the music ofHildegard von Bingen (1098–1179), a German Benedictine abbess, and Finnish composerKaija Saariaho (born 1952) has begun to enter the canon. Saariaho's operaL'amour de loin has been staged in some of the world's major opera houses, including TheEnglish National Opera (2009)[73] and in 2016 theMetropolitan Opera in New York.
The classical ensemble canon very rarely integrates musical instruments that are not acoustic and of western origins, it stayed apart from the wide use of electric, electronic and digital instruments that are common in today's popular music.
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The backbone of traditional Westernart history areartworks commissioned by wealthy patrons for private or public enjoyment. Much of this was religious art, mostlyRoman Catholic art. Theclassical art of Greece and Rome has, since the Renaissance, been the fount of the Western tradition.
Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) is the originator of the artistic canon and the originator of many of the concepts it embodies. HisLives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects covers only artists working in Italy,[74] with a strong pro-Florentine prejudice, and has cast a long shadow over succeeding centuries. Northern European art has arguably never quite caught up to Italy in terms of prestige, and Vasari's placing ofGiotto as the founding father of "modern" painting has largely been retained. In painting, the rather vague term ofOld master covers painters up to about the time ofGoya.
This "canon" remains prominent, as indicated by the selection present in art history textbooks, as well as the prices obtained in theart trade. But there have been considerable swings in what is valued. In the 19th century theBaroque fell into great disfavour, but it was revived from around the 1920s, by which time theart of the 18th and 19th century was largely disregarded. TheHigh Renaissance, which Vasari regarded as the greatest period, has always retained its prestige, including works byLeonardo da Vinci,Michelangelo, andRaphael, but the succeeding period ofMannerism has fallen in and out of favour.
In the 19th century the beginnings of academic art history, led by German universities, led to much better understanding and appreciation ofmedieval art, and a more nuanced understanding of classical art, including the realization that many if not most treasured masterpieces of sculpture were late Roman copies rather than Greek originals. The European tradition of art was expanded to includeByzantine art and the new discoveries ofarchaeology, notablyEtruscan art,Celtic art andUpper Paleolithic art.
Since the 20th century there has been an effort to re-define the discipline to be more inclusive of art made by women; vernacular creativity, especially in printed media; and an expansion to include works in the Western tradition produced outside Europe. At the same time there has been a much greater appreciation of non-Western traditions, including their place with Western art in wider global orEurasian traditions. Thedecorative arts have traditionally had a much lower critical status thanfine art, although often highly valued by collectors, and still tend to be given little prominence in undergraduate studies or popular coverage on television and in print.
English artist and sculptorBarbara HepworthDBE (1903 – 1975), whose work exemplifiesModernism, and in particular modern sculpture, is one of the few female artists to achieve international prominence.[76]
Women were discriminated against in terms of obtaining the training necessary to be an artist in the mainstream Western traditions. In addition, since the Renaissance thenude, more often than not female,[citation needed] has had a special position as subject matter. In her 1971 essay, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?",Linda Nochlin analyzes what she sees as the embedded privilege in the predominantly male Western art world and argues that women's outsider status allowed them a unique viewpoint to not only critique women's position in art, but to additionally examine the discipline's underlying assumptions about gender and ability.[77] Nochlin's essay develops the argument that both formal and social education restricted artistic development to men, preventing women (with rare exception) from honing their talents and gaining entry into the art world.[77]
In the 1970s, feminist art criticism continued this critique of the institutionalized sexism of art history, art museums, and galleries, and questioned which genres of art were deemed museum-worthy.[78] This position is articulated by artistJudy Chicago:"[I]t is crucial to understand that one of the ways in which the importance of male experience is conveyed is through the art objects that are exhibited and preserved in our museums. Whereas men experience presence in our art institutions, women experience primarily absence, except in images that do not necessarily reflect women's own sense of themselves."[79]
The preface to theBlackwell anthology ofRenaissance Literature from 2003 acknowledges the importance of online access to literary texts on the selection of what to include, meaning that the selection can be made on basis of functionality rather than representativity".[85] This anthology has made its selection based on three principles. One is "unabashedlycanonical", meaning that Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson have been given the space prospective users would expect. A second principle is "non-canonical", giving female writers such asAnne Askew,Elizabeth Cary,Emilia Lanier,Martha Moulsworth, andLady Mary Wroth a representative selection. It also includes texts that may not be representative of the qualitatively best efforts of Renaissance literature, but of the quantitatively most numerous texts, such as homilies and erotica. A third principle has been thematic, so that the anthology aims to include texts that shed light on issues of special interest to contemporary scholars.
The Blackwell anthology is still firmly organised around authors, however. A different strategy has been observed byThe Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse from 1992.[86] Here the texts are organised according to topic, under the headingsThe Public World,Images of Love,Topographies,Friends, Patrons and the Good Life,Church, State and Belief,Elegy and Epitaph,Translation,Writer, Language and Public. It is arguable that such an approach is more suitable for the interested reader than for the student. While the two anthologies are not directly comparable, since the Blackwell anthology also includes prose and the Penguin anthology goes up to 1659, it is telling that while the larger Blackwell anthology contains work by 48 poets, seven of which are women, the Penguin anthology contains 374 poems by 109 poets, including 13 women and one poet each in Welsh,Siôn Phylip, and Irish,Eochaidh Ó Heóghusa.
TheBest German Novels of the Twentieth Century is a list of books compiled in 1999 byLiteraturhaus München andBertelsmann, in which 99 prominent German authors, literary critics, and scholars of German ranked the most significant German-language novels of the twentieth century.[87] The group brought together 23 experts from each of the three categories.[88] Each was allowed to name three books as having been the most important of the century. Cited by the group were five titles by bothFranz Kafka andArno Schmidt, four byRobert Walser, and three byThomas Mann,Hermann Broch,Anna Seghers, andJoseph Roth.[87]
Der Kanon, edited byMarcel Reich-Ranicki, is a largeanthology of exemplary works of German literature.[89]
Seekey texts of French literature
TheCanon of Dutch Literature comprises a list of 1000 works ofDutch-language literature important to the cultural heritage of theLow Countries, and is published on theDBNL. Several of these works are lists themselves; such as early dictionaries, lists of songs, recipes, biographies, or encyclopedic compilations of information such as mathematical, scientific, medical, or plant reference books. Other items include early translations of literature from other countries, history books, first-hand diaries, and published correspondence. Notable original works can be found by author name.
TheDanish Culture Canon consists of 108 works of cultural excellence in eight categories:architecture,visual arts,design and crafts,film,literature,music,performing arts, andchildren's culture. An initiative ofBrian Mikkelsen in 2004, it was developed by a series of committees under the auspices of theDanish Ministry of Culture in 2006–2007 as "a collection and presentation of the greatest, most important works of Denmark's cultural heritage." Each category contains 12 works, although music contains 12 works of score music and 12 of popular music, and the literature section's 12th item is an anthology of 24 works.[90][91]
Världsbiblioteket (The World Library) was aSwedish list of the 100 best books in the world, created in 1991 by the Swedish literary magazineTidningen Boken. The list was compiled through votes from members of theSvenska Akademien,Swedish Crime Writers' Academy, librarians, authors, and others. Approximately 30 of the books were Swedish.
For theSpanish culture, specially for theSpanish literature, during the 19th and the first third of the 20th century similar lists were created trying to define the literary canon. This canon was established mainly through teaching programs, and literary critics likePedro Estala,Antonio Gil y Zárate,Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo,Ramón Menéndez Pidal, orJuan Bautista Bergua. In the last decades, other important critics have been contributing to the topic, among them,Fernando Lázaro Carreter,José Manuel Blecua Perdices,Francisco Rico, andJosé Carlos Mainer.
Other Spanish languages have also their own literary canons. A good introduction to the Catalan literary canon isLa invenció de la tradició literària byManel Ollé, from the Open University of Catalonia.[92]
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