Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

guarantee the longevity of an author’s work; the test of time being decisive in
establishing prominence and canonical status: “what has been longest known has been
most considered, and what is most considered is best understood” (468) or as Alexander
Pope put it, “What oft was thought but ne’er so well exprest” (v. 298). Ross aptly points
out that the conflict between absolute standards and relative value would continue
perpetually, for a consensus would only be reached if all tastes in all people in all ages
would eventually be identical (172). In fact, it is precisely this divergence of opinion that
spurred the canonical debates of the second half of the twentieth century, where the
values of “aestheticism” and “universality” considered to be “absolute” by its defenders
were opposed to the values of “relativity” and “representation” advocated by revisionists.
With the advent of print capitalism and an emerging literary market in the
eighteenth century, a clear distinction was drawn between popular literature and “art,”
thus sparking the idea that art was inversely proportional to popularity. Critics started to
consider modern texts as “popular” and ancient texts as “art,” a distinction which closely
echoes the more ancient distinction between the “High” and the “Low” in cultural
discourse as outlined earlier. Yet it is the appearance of a new reading public that
brought in the notions of “popular” and “art,” as Guillory observes:
What is new here is the distinction between serious and popular
literature—a distinction between two bodies of writing which are
alike in respect of being equally “fictional” or “imaginative”
equally distinguishable from philosophy or history, but unlike in
value. (Cultural Capital 131)
Whereas “serious” literature—i.e. “art”—contained canonical potential by aspiring to
what was then regarded as the highest considerations of ideas, style, and genre, “popular”
writings, such as the novels of Ann Radcliffe for example, were typically considered to
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