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By questions of "canon," we mean questions of what is fictionally true of some character, story, or world. What is canon is treated as authoritative or official, usually by creators and fans alike. But disputes about canon have arisen as storytellers and publishers have sought to capitalize on the popularity of their characters, churning out more and more stories to meet public demand, and at the same time engaging with growing fan bases. As audiences have become more involved, and as fictional worlds have become messier, the authoritative nature of canon—and who authorizes it—has begun to erode. In this paper, we characterize canon as an article in the evolving relation between authors and audiences. More specifically, we characterize canon as an intangible good, subject to a form of cultural negotiation, resting on a power relation between producers and consumers of fictions. In Part I, we consider the author's evolving role, and the rights of the creator to a story, character, or world. In Part II, we discuss the emerging activities of fans, particularly as they weigh on issues of canon. In Part III, we discuss canon as being subject to cultural negotiation, highlighting the importance of power dynamics in this negotiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the absence of such an assessment, Schwartz produces a forceful critique of nationalist historiography, but his own conclusions about the periodization of Persian poetry and canons must remain more uncertain. Several generations of new narratives about the transregional "cosmopoli" or "scriptworlds" of premodern prestige languages have sent scholars back to the archives to begin reading the vast corpuses produced in peripheral regions. In Persian literary studies, the process of denationalization began in earnest in the 1990s, as scholars in Iran revisited and reconsidered early modern Indo-Persian poetry that had long been dismissed as decadent by Iranians. [Extracted from the article]

The author examines the study of philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder's aesthetics by author Rachel Zuckert. He explores the difficulty in explaining the normative power of canons in every cultural practice that wields orientational force, the claim that Herder is a naturalist in aesthetics, the comparison of counter-canonical streams of culture to the tale of Sleeping Beauty, and the representation of anti-Hegelian streams in aesthetic theory by the commitment to the equal validity of antithetical tastes.

Current church debates and queer scholarship unearth Sodom as a site for contesting the relationships between sexuality, religion, queerness, and destruction. In John Rechy's novels City of Night and Numbers , the Sodom story provides an archetype for the books' hustler narrators, whose insatiable desires draw them repeatedly back into 'the city of night of the soul', and ultimately, oblivion. Drawing on Heather Love and Catherine Keller, I read Rechy as adapting the Sodom story rather than rejecting it in favour of progress or liberation, as do many queer biblical interpreters and theologians. Rechy's hustlers display a sodomitic subjectivity in their refusal to be whole, which has made his relation to gay/queer and Chicanx literary canons uneasy. Precisely in his 'backwardness', Rechy illustrates how theological categories continue to shape gay/queer identities in the 20th century and today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the canon and culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, some critics hazarded the possibility that American literature might fragment and disappear as a discipline. But 20 years later, as these book proposals suggest, we've abandoned totalizing national theories in favor of a more hemispheric study of how literatures variously treat sociological, political, ideological, historical, and environmental problems. We've entirely abandoned the nearly allwhite canon that characterized the study of American literature through the early 1980s; our literary archives are far more heterogeneous. While we've abandoned grand theories, there is much greater emphasis on the role of our own critical agency, and an impressive optimism about literature as an actual agent of power and its ability to participate in both indexing and making better worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the revival of the de viris illustribus genre in the twelfth century. These catalogues of the most important Christian authors were modelled on a template created in late antiquity by Jerome, but adopted new attitudes to what constitutes distinguished Christian literary activity. They regard the editing, collecting, and re-ordering of texts as equal to the composition of new works, and recognize legal codification as a noteworthy activity. As such, they represent the broadening out of a Latin Christian literary canon. These texts complicate our ideas about the relationship between 'authority' and 'amplification' in the twelfth-century renaissance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the revival of the de viris illustribus genre in the twelfth century. These catalogues of the most important Christian authors were modelled on a template created in late antiquity by Jerome, but adopted new attitudes to what constitutes distinguished Christian literary activity. They regard the editing, collecting, and re-ordering of texts as equal to the composition of new works, and recognize legal codification as a noteworthy activity. As such, they represent the broadening out of a Latin Christian literary canon. These texts complicate our ideas about the relationship between 'authority' and 'amplification' in the twelfth-century renaissance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author explores author Thomas Kyd's canon proposed by Brian Vickers, namely "The Spanish Tragedy," "Soliman and Perseda," "King Leir," "Arden of Faversham," "Fair Em" and "Cornelia." Topics discussed include the use of MacDonald P. Jackson's technique to examine scholarly assumptions regarding the distribution of unique formal trigrams in texts, and the challenge of distinguishing influence from authorship in attribution studies.

The project of repudiating the exceptionalism associated with the Cold War–era founders of American studies came at the same academic moment as the canon debates—they both started in the mid-1980s. They are twinned countercultural movements, and at their origin they were explicitly interrelated. We've debunked American exceptionalism, but we're still practically glued to the old-fashioned canon—at least where the nineteenth century is concerned. This essay takes up the incompletion at the heart of what began as a conjoined movement against the exceptionalisms of national and literary canons, arguing that our attachment to canonical authors indexes the larger insolvency of our anti-exceptionalist project. It argues for a different critical methodology, one grounded in self-criticism, incompletion, and imperfection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While studies on diachronic Chinese syntax have identified a number of linguistic changes in Medieval Chinese, they have mostly been underpinned by qualitative analyses. In the most large-scale quantitative analysis to-date, this article investigates changes in the use of classifiers, demonstratives, and copulae. Our analysis, based on the Chinese Buddhist Canon, examines over 40 million characters in texts spanning a millennium. Results suggest that from the late Eastern Han period (circa 150 CE) onwards, the vernacular style became increasingly widespread, at the expense of the literary style, as reflected by changes in the use of classifiers and demonstratives, and in the construction of nominal sentences. However, the vernacular style became less frequently used in the Northern Sung period (960–1127 CE). This reversal may shed light on the work of the Stylists, editors appointed by the Sung court to polish Buddhist texts with more literary elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 'Christopher Marlowe: Hype and Hoax'(2018), Hartmut Ilsemann implies that his application of the Rolling Delta feature of R Stylo is sufficiently robust that a century and a half of traditional scholarship should be overturned, and Marlowe stripped of the majority of his canon, including Doctor Faustus and Edward II. The article concludes that 'Marlowe is totally overrated in his influence on modern English drama' (p. 26), the natural consequence of stripping away 5/7ths of his canon. In this response, I demonstrate that the assumptions underlying this application of the Delta method, and the application itself, are fundamentally flawed, leading to predictably erroneous conclusions. Problems with the study include a poorly designed test environment, incorrect preparation of texts, assuming that 'Marlowe's style' can be determined by a single early play, selecting and constructing Shakespeare's comparison texts in a manner likely to prejudice results, ignoring the effect upon style of a play's date and genre, failing to consider the effect of different-length comparison texts, and dismissing external evidence of authorship that conflicts with the test outcomes. I argue that in the light of these issues, the results and conclusions must be dismissed. Further, the question is raised as to whether the current methods of computational stylistics, even when more rigorously applied, are equipped to challenge the attribution of the accepted Marlowe canon. 1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Francis Meres (1565-1647) is remembered chiefly for the survey of 'English poetry' that he offers in Palladis Tamia (1598), which includes a number of laudatory comments on Shakespeare. Since the 1930s, scholars have known that this seemingly original critical intervention is a tissue of unacknowledged quotations, stitched together from the works of others. This article asks how an author who was at once a high priest of the culture of textual recycling could have come to make a seemingly pioneering statement about the English literary canon. As well as identifying a key source for the Palladis in Jean Dadre''s Loci communes similium et dissimilium (1577), my argument draws on the annotations in a number of newly-uncovered books from Meres's library, and on the epitaph that he wrote for his wife in the pages of a parish register, to ask what reading might have meant to an author who was seemingly incapable of speaking with his own tongue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an overview of contemporary scholarship on French playwright Pierre Corneille. Writings about Corneille by scholars including Serge Doubrovsky, Harold Bloom, and Marie-Odile Sweetser are considered. His canon of works, which includes including the plays "Le Cid," "Horace," and "Cinna," is explored.

The phenomenon of recently rediscovered philosophical works by women who wrote from antiquity until the late 20th century is outlined in this paper. It questions what the English-language canon of philosophy is, what it ought to be, and what criteria ought to be employed or avoided in determining which authors and works merit inclusion in that canon. It examines biases to avoid when attempting to construct the canon of philosophy and to right the wrongful omission of women. Further, it suggests that employing particular criteria and avoiding particular biases will result in the expansion of the present canon to include the philosophical perspectives of minority and indigenous peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The numerous and varied eighteenth-century abridgments of Robinson Crusoe have for too long escaped the attention of Defoe's bibliographers. Many have noted the existence of these derivative works, but few have ventured to explain their significance. What little scholarship does exist tends to focus on the children's abridgments published by the Newberys in the second half of the eighteenth century. However, children's abridgments and chapbooks represent but a small portion of the total number of abbreviated editions published prior to 1801. In particular, two different abridgments published by a coterie of London booksellers in the 1720s would become the base texts for nearly 100 further English-language editions. And unlike the Newbery abridgments, these were not designed exclusively for juvenile audiences. This essay seeks to answer the following questions. How did abridged editions of Robinson Crusoe differ from Defoe's original? How did the abridgments contribute to the canonization of Robinson Crusoe? And what was the legal status of the abridgments? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores the political aspects of the digitization of research materials related to the study of 19th century literature. The author reflects on how archives reflect issues within Victorian studies such as the integration of imperialism. Other topics include decolonizing literary studies, gaps in the digital literary canon, and incorporating issues of race and ethnicity.

The article reports on the 1886 publication of "The Adventures of Ulysses," by Charles Lamb, submitted to the Office of the Librarian of Congress by textbook author David Henry Montgomery as part of the "Classics for Children series" of the textbook publishing house Ginn & Company. Topics include 19th century American literary canon, the cultural relevancy of Homer, and literary adaptation/

This essay discusses the "Shadow of the Canon," a collection of non-Shakespearean modern drama with a topic that has history as its basis ranging from"The Spanish Dream to Edward II" to "The Knight of the Burning Pestle." Topics discussed include authorial canon which slowly moves from one movement to another, efforts of writers to deviate from Shakespearean style, and the development of a new style showing poetic richness.

An essay is presented on the practice of separating serialized fiction into canonical and noncanonical subtexts. It offers an examination of "massive serialized collaborative fiction" such as the film series "Star Wars" and the distinction between the canonical and noncanonical divide The author goes on to determine the practical and pragmatic reasons for drawing distinctions between canonical and noncanonical subtexts as well as the philosophically substantial reasons.

The first attempt at a collected edition of Swift's Works remains little studied and decidedly puzzling in several important respects. Eighteenth-century commentators mostly either ignored it or derided it as scrappy and discreditable. For the next two hundred years, it was usually regarded as an irrelevance or an embarrassment. In the last half century, however, it has been increasingly treated as Swift's attempt to create a literary monument for himself. Unfortunately, we have little evidence as to how much involvement Swift had in the selection of the contents or how much textual oversight he exercised during the process of publication. Such evidence as we possess suggests probably not a lot in either case. Recent scholars have generally agreed that the 1735 text of Gulliver's Travels has greater authority than the London edition of 1726, but beyond that much remains questionable. Analysis of the contents of the Works does not suggest that Swift saw it as a ‘monument’ or as a claim to literary eminence. For whatever reasons, the edition omits important published works (including A Tale of a Tub), as well as Verses on the Death of Dr Swift (written 1731) and The History of the Last Four Years of the Queen (a work important to Swift, but not published until 1758). Conversely, the edition does include a great many trivial and occasional pieces. It heavily emphasizes Irish works, not the writings of 1710-14, the period to which Swift harked back nostalgically for the rest of his life. The Faulkner Works comes across as an odd mélange of major and minor works plus topical trivia, not as a systematic attempt to build a posthumous reputation. Given Swift's longstanding casual attitude towards the publication or even preservation of most of his works, moreover, we would be unwise to assume that ‘1735’ possesses textual authority except in the case of Gulliver. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses religious aspects of the popularity of the "Star Wars" film series through fan clubs and the satirical religion Jediism. It is said that fans of the series have created the equivalent of a scriptural canon consisting of authoritative versions of the films. Topics include fan reactions to alterations to original films by director George Lucas, a comparison between popular culture fandom and traditional religions, and the definition of religions and scriptural canons in view of social processes.

In 1944, Thomas Parry published, in Welsh, his ‘History of Welsh Literature to 1900’. It was a work whose scope was unparalleled by previous literary histories, covering thirteen centuries of literature in Welsh. In one volume, Parry created for Welsh speakers a comprehensive literary canon that not only defined the aspirations and identity of a cultural group but also called a nation into being. This article explores some of the reasons why the medieval is privileged in the Welsh literary canon, and how cultural and political authority, both Welsh and English, has worked to ensure the stability of the medieval canon for more than two centuries. The efforts of Welsh literary historians to naturalize the medieval Welsh canon were supported by English critical opinion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the article looks in particular at the work of Matthew Arnold and Hector and Nora Chadwick, arguing that they played a significant role in validating the canon of medieval Welsh literature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Eliza Haywood (1693 - 1756) has gained more critical attention in recent years, but the bibliographical foundations for her canon largely remain unquestioned. Patrick Spedding, in his heavily documented 2004 bibliography, lists 72 works as ‘certainly by Haywood’. Of these 72 items, 42 were published during just seven years, from 1723 to 1729 inclusive. This represents some 330 sheets, equivalent to more than 5000 pages in octavo. Did Haywood really write all these texts? What is the basis for their attribution? The texts in Spedding's bibliography are attributed to Haywood on the basis of a wide variety of types of evidence, and Spedding's bibliography does not account for any measure of doubt in each attribution case: works are either by Haywood, or they are not. In this article, I will argue that 29 out of Spedding's 72 works are attributed based on less than satisfactory evidence -- including Bath-Intrigues (1724), The Opera of Operas (1733), and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751). I am focusing primarily on external evidence, rather than internal, and I am purposely looking at the evidence skeptically in order to re-assess its validity. In many cases there may be suggestive internal evidence or biographical parallels that point towards Haywood as a likely author, but in the absence of solid proof such attributions must be considered warily. I am not suggesting that we de-attribute these works, but rather that we need to be more cautious in considering Haywood's authorship as certain. If we are to regard Haywood as an important writer whose works deserve close scrutiny, we need to be more scrupulous about the evidence we use to determine what she wrote, and to acknowledge degrees of confidence and doubt. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A literary criticism of the 1807 edition of the book "The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer" is presented. According to the author, the unknown editor of this edition made several important changes to the order and sometimes the content of the poems with the goal of establishing a canon of Chaucer's authentic works. Topics discussed include the editor's preface and his use of an edition of "The Canterbury Tales" by Geoffrey Chaucer, edited by Thomas Tyrwhitt.

An essay is presented on the works and canons of Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats. It mentions how his writings were influenced with a Shakespearean dimension and the Renaissance expertise of A. H. Bullen, which Yeats used in writing to Lady Gregory and his publisher, and the idea of death which appealed to Yeats as a heroic self-completion. It also discusses how Yeats rewrites, edits, and rearranges his works in order to present them in a right and confident manner.

Using ‘new-optics’ stylometric measures of comparative Shakespeare discrepancy we calculate the odds that the ‘Shakespeare’ scenes in STMO and Edw3 could have come by chance from a person of Shakespeare's writing habits. For STMO, if written in the 1600s, the ‘Shakespeare’ Hand D-plus verse portion is seven to twenty-six times less likely to be Shakespeare's than Shakespeare's own farthest-outlier baseline threshold block. Shakespeare authorship for it in the 1600s seems to us improbable but not impossible. In STMO were written in the 1590s, it would be ten times less probable, and not such a close call. The odds that Shakespeare could have written the entire play at any time are vanishingly low. In terms of Shakespeare discrepancy, we would say that Hand D-plus belongs more in the high Apocrypha than in the Canon. Taken separately, four of the five ‘Shakespeare’ blocks of Edw3 fall inside our Shakespeare ballpark. So does a sixth block, scenes 4.05 to 4.09. If we followed the consensus strictly, all five Shakespeare blocks, taken as a group, would not make a probable solo Shakespeare ascription. However, if we switched 4.04 to ‘non-Shakespeare,’ and 4.05-.09 to ‘Shakespeare,’ the revised Shakespeare blocks would be a plausible Shakespeare ascription even as a group, justifying the inclusion of Edw3 in the Canon as partly Shakespeare's: 1.02; 2.01–2.02; and 4.05–4.09. The odds that the ‘non-Shakespeare’ scenes, collectively, or individually (except for 4.05–4.09) could be his are vanishingly low. This is the first of a two-part series, addressed to Shakespeare's hand in Sir Thomas More. Part II, on Shakespeare's hand in Edward III, will appear in the next issue. The full article may be found online at http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/facultysites/govt/FacMember/welliott/UTConference/2ToughNuts.pdf [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the use of quotation evidence from canonical literary texts in the Oxford English Dictionary. The proportionately high representation of quotations from authors such as Shakespeare and Scott in OED quotations has been discussed since the 1980s, and has been emphasised in some of the most important adverse criticism of the dictionary. After commenting on the historical background to the dictionary's treatment of literary quotation evidence, the article examines two kinds of claim which have been made about it: first, that the record of the English language is avoidably distorted by OED's past and continuing preference for quotations from canonical (and preponderantly male) authors, and second, that some choices made in the selection of quotation evidence appear to reflect the personal prejudices of OED editors. In evaluating these claims, it discusses the practicalities of gathering and replacing quotation evidence and the relationship of readers to different kinds of evidence, and analyses a number of OED entries with regard to the quotation material which they use or might have used. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the challenge for literary scholars to document truth depicting the lives and dramatic art of the twentieth-century U.S. writers captivated by Communism through which difficulty in reaching the standard, inconsistent studies of the most politically committed U.S. literary radicals of the past century were manifested. It features some literary scholars and popular editions including Agnes Smedley, Stephen R. MacKinnon, and Janice R. MacKinnon. Other literary transitions and attributes to novelists are also presented.

An essay is presented that contends that the witness of the "Epistula Apostolorum" was the first to defend the four-gospel as early as 140s. It cites evidences that Irenaeus was not the first to defend the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John but rather the author of the Epistula Apostolorum. It contends that the Epistula's author held the four gospel texts to be apostolic and authoritative. It also explores and compares the content of the passage with other gospels.

Princeton—Stanford Working Papers in Classics (PSWPC) is a web-based series of work-in-progress scripts by members of two leading departments of classics. It introduces the humanities to a new form of scholarly communication and represents a major advance in the free availability of classical-studies scholarship in cyberspace. This article both reviews the initial performance of this open-access experiment and the benefits and challenges of working papers more generally for classical studies. After 2 years of operation PSWPC has proven to be a clear success. This series has built up a large international readership and a sizeable body of pre-prints and performs important scholarly and community- outreach functions. As this performance is largely due to its congruency with the working arrangements of ancient historians and classicists and the global demand for open-access scholarship, the series confirms the viability of this means of scholarly communication, and the likelihood of its expansion in our discipline. But modifications are required to increase the benefits this series brings and the amount of scholarship it makes freely available online. Finally, departments wishing to replicate its success will have to consider other important developments, such as the increasing availability of post-prints, the linking of research funding to open access, and the emergence of new cyber-infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on semantic approaches to the idea of a literary canon. Account of the Lake Champlain-Great Lakes controversy of 1998; Etymology, ambiguity and equivocation of canon; Details of the Canon Alexandrinus; Comparison of the modalities of thought applied to the idea of a literary canon.

Supposes that Wither's canon has yet been established in full. Wither's critical standing that scholars have not located his works; Tendency of bibliographers to try expand the works of Wither canon; George Wither's works used only by the poet in majority of his works; Period where Wither published the greatest number of works without an authorial name.

Refutes the argument of Willie van Peer that literary canons are ideological formations. Tendency to view canons in political terms; Importance of intrinsic aesthetic quality of the literary masterpieces; Systematic confusion between ideology and political action; Canon transformations with canon formations.

Discusses the formation of the literary canon. Definition of the literary cannon; Discussion of canonization processes; Reference to a book by Barbara Herrnstein Smith on formulations; Analysis of the `Romeo and Juliet' text, to test certain assertions; Other references to William Shakespeare novels.

The author reports that he has uncovered a previously undocumented source for a short story entitled "‘A Really Nice Story" written by English novelist Somerset Maugham. He found it while scanning the May 20, 1902 issue of the New Zealand newspaper "Hawera & Normanby Star," digitized courtesy of the National Library of New Zealand. The efforts of bibliographer Raymond Toole Stott to create a literary canon of Maugham's works is detailed. An overview of the story's plot and an analysis of its non-fictional elements is also provided.

Abstracts of issue articles on topics including just war theory in an ancient Indian epic, the notion of an authentic canon for the Star Wars film series, and the role of patriarchal blessings in early Mormonism.

Suggests that the discussion of literary value needs to be refocused by considering the canon and artistic failure. Arguments concerning how literary value is constituted; Category of literary works that have no recognized value; Two classes of forgotten works; Advantages of arguments from artistic failure.