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Twentieth-Century Scholarship and the Eighteenth-Century Canon

The “canon” and its conception, care, and feeding have concerned students of eighteenth-century literature for at least the last decade. Such concerns have spawned books, articles, conferences, journal issues, forums, dissertations, heat and, sometimes, light. Where did “the canon” come from? When did it begin? Who made it? What were the criteria for inclusion? Were there competing canons? Was it or were they variously political? Biased? Male, female, right, wrong, all of the above, or whatever? If the answers are neither consistent nor universally compelling they nonetheless respond to valuable questions. Two substantial books are among the recent contributions to this effort, each laudably conceived with the common denominator in its title: Jonathan Brody Kramnick’s Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 and Trevor Ross’s Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century. I discuss each book, move to some implications for contemporary scholarship, and conclude with some of my own views regarding the eighteenth-century canon. Along the way, I suggest how the ignored works of Alexander Thomson can help us to understand that canon.