The Literary Canon: What's In It?

If you're feeling brave, feel free to look up any Twitter debate on 'The Canon'. It's an increasingly partisan debate and... yeah, that's all I'll say about that. I don't really feel up to arguing in favour of either side, whether we should be focusing our teaching on the classics of the canon or whether we should be attempting to destablise the canon by looking at texts written by marginalised voices - it's just too big a question for me to pour any energy into right now. 

I do confess, however, to having more than a passing interest in the canon. 

My introduction to the concept of a 'canon' was through my childhood love of Doctor Who, wherein fans would refer to anything that formed part of the 'official' narrative as 'The Canon'. Even now in Doctor Who fandom there are endless debates about whether something counts as canon or not. Many of these fans aren't even aware that the term has a far more academic meaning. 

Next, as a teenager, I realised that the term's etymology was partially linked to theology. Thinking about it in this way - that the Canon refers to the texts officially accepted by the Church (and this extends to canonized saints) - it helped me to make sense of why the term has come to be used in various other ways.

Then I learned about the Literary Canon, and the Western Canon; maddeningly elastic concepts that can seem as solid as marble or as slippery as an avalanche. And the canons go on... there's a canon for comics, a canon for film, a canon of short stories, one for poetry, one for music, and ones for art, philosophy, architecture, and on and on and on. If enough people think it's important then there might be a canon for it.

And let me be unequivocal here: there is no exact Western or Literary Canon. 

Isn't it fun? Exclusive? Exhausting?

I enjoy making lists. So I made a list to represent the Literary Canon (and one for comics, one for science fiction, one for film, etc.). As I've said above, there's no one, single, definitive Literary Canon (despite what anyone tells you), so this is a living meta-list, one that I continue to add to, and it so far represents information pulled from the following places:

• 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die - a decent attempt at a collaborative canon that utilises contributions from approximately 100 academics and eminent literary critics. 
• The Bokklubben World Library - a master list of the '100 best books' compiled by the Norwegian Book Club in 2002. Created via proposals from 100 writers from 54 separate countries.
• Classic Chinese Novels - this refers to the 10 key novels within China's own literary canon.
• Guardian Top 100 - I included this because I like the literature stuff the Guardian puts out, and I wanted something a bit more popular included.
  
• Times Top 100 - for an American perspective. 
• Pulitzer - America's most prestigious literary prize.
• Miles Franklin - Australia's oldest and perhaps most academically-respected prize. Included here because I'm Australian.
  
• Booker Prize - one of the most well-known international prizes in English language literature. I've also included the shortlisted novels alongside the winners.
• Costa and Commonwealth - I've included these two major literary prizes just to try and broaden the list out a little with more recent titles.
• Asian Classics - a collation of a few titles considered to be part of the canon across the continent of Asia.
  
• Modern Library - a 100+ year old publishing initiative where a board of 'prominent thinkers' put together a Top 100 fiction novels.
• The Western Canon - Harold Bloom is probably the chief Canonist of the 20th century. His 'Western Canon' sought to pull together the definitive list of texts that have informed Western thinking. I've only included the novels and full length non-fiction texts from the list - I've opted to consider the poetry and plays as their own separate canons.

Some ground rules I established while sifting through these canons for the curating of this Literary Canon:

1. The focus is on novels and books. These are primarily fictional, though there are some crossover non-fiction novels that seemed to find their way onto some of the above lists, so I've included those too.
2. I've left out plays/drama, poetry, and opera - I feel like these could have their own lists, especially as they appear to be becoming increasingly niche as the decades and centuries go on. The only poetry that is the exception to this rule is when an author creates a long-form poem or narrative poem that exists as a singular book. 
3. There is the odd graphic novel that made its way onto some of the above lists (such as Watchmen) but I've chosen to leave this out as the Comics Canon is quite extensive and deserves to live as its own list. 
4. Some of the above lists include the occasional book series. In these cases I've broken each series up into the individual books.
5. There are not any individual short stories in this Literary Canon but there are some entire short story collections - I've included these to reflect wherever they've been mentioned by the above lists.
   
6. I have not added anything that I personally felt should be in there. That would defeat the purpose of researching the canon.
   

 Anyway... here's the list!