The Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Trevor Ross’s long and detailed book about the early history of the
English literary canon began as a doctoral thesis and shows many signs
of its origins. It is immensely learned and presents the results of
extraordinarily wide reading. Basically, it tries to push back the date
for the earliest serious and conscious discussions of canonicity beyond
the currently accepted date for their appearance (in the 18th century).
Ross amasses considerable evidence to bolster his claim, and it would be
pleasant to state that he achieves his purpose, and leave it at that.

Unfortunately, however,various aspects of the book trouble me and cause
me to respond to his argument with some skepticism. First, he
confidently exposes the “real” motives behind various arguments from
the past, yet seems unaware that his own assumptions are embarrassingly
close to the fashionable literary-critical theories of our own time.
“Canon-making,” he tells us, “was, as ever, deeply informed by
ideological bias.” No doubt—but so is the canon-deconstruction of
modern critical theory. There is something decidedly troubling about the
silent assumption that we are in a better position to avoid bias than
our literary ancestors.

Similarly, Ross’s terminology is so relentlessly later–20th-century
that one wonders how far it distorts his view of the past. What happens
when, for instance, he uses phrases like “highbrow” and “to
de-radicalize the theatrical space” to describe 18th-century attitudes
to Shakespeare? I also wonder about the reliability of his summaries of
earlier arguments; in reading him, I was often aware of a surprising
literalism in his interpretation of poets for whom hyperbole was
habitual.

In addition, Ross’s prose is not (as they say nowadays)
“reader-friendly.” If you don’t mind working through sentences
like “Many of the gestures [Johnson] relied on therefore possessed a
certain objectivist facticity in appearing to propose quantifications of
this consensus,” fair enough. Personally, I found 300 pages of this
sort of thing wearying.