Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

while English progressively emerged as the vernacular and slowly evolved into its
modern standardized form. In sixteenth-century England, the overall process of
canonization aimed to establish English as a literary language comparable to Greek and
Latin as well as other pan-European languages such as French—which English
eventually replaced as the primary language of literary production. To that effect, John
Dryden stated that the overall objective of canonization was “to vindicate the honor of
our English writers from the censure of those who unjustly prefer the French before
them,” and it is within this context that John Gower and Chaucer were recognized as the
first canonized English authors according to Sir Philip Sidney (327). Yet amidst the
political implications of nationalistic ideologies, critics and writers still preserved the
Platonic notion that literature should serve educational purposes. In defining Poetry,
Sidney echoes the ancient dictum that its objective is “to teach and delight,” a paradigm
first codified by Horace in his Ars Poetica—“the man who combines pleasure with
usefulness wins every suffrage, delighting the reader and also giving him
advice…(1.344)”—and echoed by legions of critics after him, such as John Dryden,
Samuel Johnson, and Matthew Arnold.
According to Trevor Ross, Ben Jonson’s Workes became “the first self-
consciously canonical edition of an author’s works in English literature (108),” which
marked a shift in thought by valuing individual authors and their work, not the overall
genre (109), and thus the idea of valuing a work on intrinsic value appeared (114). In
light of such conflicting views of literary value, some authors and critics supported the
idea of valuing literature based on popularity with readers (Ross 118), a notion that did
not fail to spark intense scrutiny among neoclassical critics in the ensuing ages and
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