This task is an exploration of canon formation—specifically, the ways in which some scholarly writers and works are advised “major” while others are marginalized as “minor” or even “unimportant.”

The American Heritage lexicon has eleven distinct delineations of the term canon, the most relevant of which is "an authoritative register, as of the works of a scribe" and "a basis for judgment; standard; criterion." Canon is furthermore defined as "the publications of the Bible formally identified by the Church," and the idea of a scholarly canon also suggests some such authorized status. To go in the canon, or more correctly, to be going into the canon is to gain certain obvious privileges. The gatekeepers of the fortress of high culture include influential detractors, repository controllers and their planks of trustees, and far more menial scholars and teachers. Indeed, a head enforcer of the canon seems in middlebrow anthologies, those hangers on of high heritage that in the Victorian time span took the form of burst anthologies like Golden Treasury and today that of foremost college anthologies in America. To emerge in the Norton or Oxford anthology is to have accomplished, not precisely greatness but what is more important, certainly -- rank and accessibility to a reading public. And that is why, of course, it affairs that so couple of women writers have organized to gain entrance to such anthologies.

Belonging to the canon confers rank, communal, political, financial, aesthetic, no one of which can effortlessly be extricated from the others. Belonging to the canon is a guarantee of value, and that assurance of high aesthetic quality serves as a promise, an agreement, that broadcasts to the viewer, "Here is something to be relished as an aesthetic object. Complex, tough, privileged, the object before you have been winnowed by the perceptive few and the not-so-perceptive many, and it will repay your attention. You will obtain delight; at least you're presumed to, and if you don't, well, possibly there's certain thing off with your apparatus." Such a broadcast of status by the poem, painting, or construction, sonata, or dance that has appeared ensconced within a canon serves a mighty separating reason: it directly stands forward, distinct, better, to be valued, loved, and enjoyed. It is the wheat winnowed from the chaff, the rare survivor, and it has all the privileges of such survival.

Anyone who has studied publications in a lesser school or university in the western world knows what that means. It means that the works in the canon get read, read by neophyte students and allegedly professional teachers. It also means that to read these privileged works is a privilege and a sign of privilege. It is furthermore a signaled that one has been canonized oneself -- beatified by the experience of being presented to beauty, accepted to the ranks of those of the inner circle who are acquainted with the canon and can judge what belongs and does not.

Introduction

A prominent late 18th and 19th century literary figure Barbauld was known and admired ...