Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

emergence of new genres in literature, there was a conscious effort to privilege poetry
over other forms of writing, thus institutionalizing a hierarchy of genres whose highest
echelon was occupied by poetry. Guillory points out that this hegemony prevailed from
the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century (123, 131) and was championed by generations
of writers and critics such as Thomas Gray, William Wordsworth, and T.S. Eliot.
As mentioned earlier in the analysis of the selection process executed by Plato
and the first canonizers of the Bible, the question of literary value has played an
important primordial role in the discourses surrounding canon-formation. Several
paradoxical notions of value battled throughout the Restoration. Whereas some critics
privileged knowledge over pleasure, others proposed that value be based on social
conditions (Ross 155). As a result, there was a push for objective values and with time,
some turned to valuing authors and works as a means of determining cultural value, thus
conferring superior authority to certain texts and authors for establishing cultural
standards. The concept that “instead of circulating value, literature contains it” (Ross
156-7) marked the birth of aestheticism, which maintained that value is based on
eloquence and style and thus, style became valued as an author’s expression of his/her
individualism. While historicist arguments were used to defend a more pluralist, relative
view of a given context (170), both Dryden and Johnson concurred in determining that
greatness was perceived in the ability of an author to address “permanent verities of
nature and human experience” (Dryden in Ross 166) and appeal to the “universal” rather
than the “particular. As Johnson points out, “Great thoughts are always general, and
consist in positions not limited by exceptions, and in descriptions not descending to
minuteness” (Lives 482). Consequently, Johnson believed that these properties would
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