Making the English Canon

Download or read book Making the English Canon written by Jonathan Brody Kramnick and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jonathan Brody Kramnick's book examines the formation of the English canon over the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century. Kramnick details how the idea of literary tradition emerged out of a prolonged engagement with the institutions of cultural modernity, from the public sphere and national identity to capitalism and the print market. Looking at a wide variety of eighteenth-century critical writing, he analyses the tensions that inhabited the categories of national literature and public culture at the moment of their emergence.