Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

As a reaction to this “democratization,” which cultural authorities perceived as an
unregulated expansion of undisciplined readers, literary criticism became a figure of
authority in the process of establishing taste and setting value, and determined the
boundaries between high and low culture, between what was considered popular writing
and “serious” literature. This sparked the view that great Art was inversely proportional
to popularity by incorporating the particular issues of audience and readership—and
specifically as they relate to gender and class—within the cultural discourses of critical
reception and canon-formation. As Guillory points out, this trend also triggered a clear
tendency to establish hierarchies amongst genres as championed by Wordsworth and
Coleridge; poetry, for example, was given “unquestioned generic superiority” (Cultural
Capital 131). In sum, institutional authorities, such as critics and teachers, played an
essential role in reviewing and criticizing literature. In doing so, they were determining
which works should be read and how, as well as arguing for the importance of having a
literary canon.
Two interrelated conceptualizations dominated canon-formation practices up to
the late eighteenth century: the Platonic ideal that literature should serve moral and social
functions and Horace’s notion that literature should “instruct and delight.” Chapter One
outlined how Plato carefully selected which texts would teach the citizens of the republic
the best examples of civil and moral conduct. The same criteria were used when the
process of canonization involved the decision of which books should be included in the
Bible by reflecting the standards of moral conduct and social behavior that the
ecclesiastic authorities had set in the community. Through the ensuing periods, Plato’s
ideology was coupled with the Horatian paradigm in the critical works of authors such as
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