Western canon

The Western canon is the body of high culture literature, music, philosophy, and works of art that is highly valued in the West: works that have achieved the status of classics.

Western culture has its roots in Greco-Roman culture from classical antiquity (see Western canon).

The first writer to use the term "classic" was Aulus Gellius, a 2nd-century Roman writer who, in the miscellany Noctes Atticae (19, 8, 15), refers to a writer as a classicus scriptor, non proletarius ("A distinguished, not a commonplace writer").

In contrast to anthologies, whose aim is to give a selective and canonical view of literature, miscellanies were produced for the entertainment of a contemporary audience and so instead emphasise collectiveness and popularity.

A "canon" is a list of books considered to be "essential", and it can be published as a collection (such as Great Books of the Western World, Modern Library, Everyman's Library, or Penguin Classics), presented as a list with an academic's imprimatur (such as Harold Bloom's, ) or be the official reading list of a university.

Everyman's Library is a series of reprints of classic literature, primarily from the Western canon.

A "canon" is a list of books considered to be "essential", and it can be published as a collection (such as Great Books of the Western World, Modern Library, Everyman's Library, or Penguin Classics), presented as a list with an academic's imprimatur (such as Harold Bloom's, ) or be the official reading list of a university. Yale University Professor of Humanities and famous literary critic Harold Bloom (no relation) has also argued strongly in favor of the canon, in his 1994 book The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, and in general the canon remains as a represented idea in many institutions, though its implications continue to be debated.

Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literary departments were focusing on what he derided as the "literature of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, neoconservatives, and others).

Some of the writers who are generally considered the most important in Western literature are Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, François Rabelais, Michel de Montaigne, Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Molière, Jean Racine, Voltaire, Carlo Goldoni, Samuel Johnson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Alexander Pushkin, Victor Hugo, Nikolai Gogol, Charles Dickens, Ivan Turgenev, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, George Eliot, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Emily Dickinson, Arthur Rimbaud, Sigmund Freud, Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Mikhail Bulgakov, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Vladimir Nabokov, Fernando Pessoa, Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett.

He was a contemporary of the older Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature.

A "canon" is a list of books considered to be "essential", and it can be published as a collection (such as Great Books of the Western World, Modern Library, Everyman's Library, or Penguin Classics), presented as a list with an academic's imprimatur (such as Harold Bloom's, ) or be the official reading list of a university.

Literary critics see books in this series as important members of the Western canon, though many titles are translated or of non-Western origin; indeed, the series for decades from its creation included only translations, until it eventually incorporated the Penguin English Library imprint in 1986.

The Western canon is the body of high culture literature, music, philosophy, and works of art that is highly valued in the West: works that have achieved the status of classics.

In the U.S., Harold Bloom and F. R. Leavis pursued the definition of high culture, by way of the Western canon of literature.

Some of the writers who are generally considered the most important in Western literature are Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, François Rabelais, Michel de Montaigne, Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Molière, Jean Racine, Voltaire, Carlo Goldoni, Samuel Johnson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Alexander Pushkin, Victor Hugo, Nikolai Gogol, Charles Dickens, Ivan Turgenev, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, George Eliot, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Emily Dickinson, Arthur Rimbaud, Sigmund Freud, Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Mikhail Bulgakov, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Vladimir Nabokov, Fernando Pessoa, Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett.

The best of Western literature is considered to be the Western canon.

The Odyssey is fundamental to the modern Western canon; it is the second-oldest extant work of Western literature, while the Iliad is the oldest.

The word canon is derived from ancient Greek κανών, kanṓn, meaning a measuring rod, or standard.

Today, Candide is recognized as Voltaire's magnum opus and is often listed as part of the Western canon.

A classic is a book, or any other work of art, accepted as being exemplary or noteworthy, for example through an imprimatur such as being listed in a list of great books, or through a reader's personal opinion.

Eliot employs many literary and cultural allusions from the Western canon, Buddhism and the Hindu Upanishads.

Yale University Professor of Humanities and famous literary critic Harold Bloom (no relation) has also argued strongly in favor of the canon, in his 1994 book The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, and in general the canon remains as a represented idea in many institutions, though its implications continue to be debated.

The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages is a 1994 book about western literature by the critic Harold Bloom, in which the author defends the concept of the Western canon by discussing 26 writers whom he sees as central to the canon.

Homer also came to be of great influence in European culture with the resurgence of interest in Greek antiquity during the Renaissance, and it remains the first and most influential work of the Western canon.

Women have engaged in philosophy throughout the field's history.

While there have been women philosophers since ancient times, and a relatively small number were accepted as philosophers during the ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary eras, particularly during the 20th and 21st century, almost no woman philosophers have entered the philosophical Western canon.

Yasunari Kawabata (1899 – 1972) was a Japanese novelist and short story writer whose spare, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to receive the award.

Pioneering role in founding the rules of the genre in the Western canon include, among others, Rudyard Kipling (United Kingdom), Anton Chekhov (Russia), Guy de Maupassant (France), Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera (Mexico) and Rubén Darío (Nicaragua).

In the 18th century Metaphysical poetry fell into further disrepute, while the interest in Elizabethan poetry was rekindled through the scholarship of Thomas Warton and others.

While the canon of Renaissance English poetry of the 16th has always been in some form of flux, it is only towards the late 20th century that concerted efforts were made to challenge the canon.

The Aeneid is a cornerstone of the Western canon, and early (at least by the 2nd century AD) became one of the essential elements of a Latin education, usually required to be memorized.

The Western canon is the body of high culture literature, music, philosophy, and works of art that is highly valued in the West: works that have achieved the status of classics. A classic is a book, or any other work of art, accepted as being exemplary or noteworthy, for example through an imprimatur such as being listed in a list of great books, or through a reader's personal opinion.

Some of the writers who are generally considered the most important in Western literature are Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, François Rabelais, Michel de Montaigne, Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Molière, Jean Racine, Voltaire, Carlo Goldoni, Samuel Johnson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Alexander Pushkin, Victor Hugo, Nikolai Gogol, Charles Dickens, Ivan Turgenev, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, George Eliot, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Emily Dickinson, Arthur Rimbaud, Sigmund Freud, Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Mikhail Bulgakov, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Vladimir Nabokov, Fernando Pessoa, Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett.

The critic Harold Bloom placed Johnson's work firmly within the Western canon, describing him as "unmatched by any critic in any nation before or after him...Bate in the finest insight on Johnson I know, emphasised that no other writer is so obsessed by the realisation that the mind is an activity, one that will turn to destructiveness of the self or of others unless it is directed to labour."

A related word is masterpiece or chef d'œuvre, which in modern use refers to a creation that has been given much critical praise, especially one that is considered the greatest work of a person's career or to a work of outstanding creativity, skill, or workmanship.

A "canon" is a list of books considered to be "essential", and it can be published as a collection (such as Great Books of the Western World, Modern Library, Everyman's Library, or Penguin Classics), presented as a list with an academic's imprimatur (such as Harold Bloom's, ) or be the official reading list of a university.

Plato was a philosopher in Classical Greece and the founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world.

Much of this set of traditions and knowledge is collected in the Western canon.

In the latter half of the 20th century the canon expanded to cover the so-called Early music of the pre-classical period, and Baroque music by composers other than Bach and George Frideric Handel.

Baroque music forms a major portion of the "classical music" canon, and is now widely studied, performed, and listened to.