
A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Literary Canon
A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Literary Canon https://ift.tt/2NYqXFz Illustration: Tim McDonagh Why Now? Okay, assessing a century’s literary legacy after only 18 and a half years is kind of a bizarre thing to do. Actually, constructing a canon of any kind is a little weird at the moment, when so much of how we measure cultural value is in flux. Born of the ancient battle over which stories belonged in the “canon” of the Bible, the modern literary canon took root in universities and became defined as the static product of consensus — a set of leather-bound volumes […]