After his conquest of Gaza in 332 BCE, it is said that Alexander the Great’s soldiers presented him with a coffer in which the Persian king Darius had stored his most prized treasures. Wishing to safekeep his own greatest possession, Alexander, emptied the coffer of its contents and placed within it a copy of Homer’s Iliad specially prepared for him by his teacher, Aristotle. This anecdote offers a pointed illustration of the fundamental elements at play in the formula of the literary classic: an object holding a renowned and celebrated work, the mediation of a scholarly editor and that of a powerful figure’s entourage, and the use of literature in politically and ideologically charged circumstances. History does not tell us what became of king Darius’ trove.

Since the time of Alexander, both Homer and his work have remained literary classics, indeed classics par excellence. A classic is not only a successful work, a favorite book, an ancient volume, a classroom staple or a consecrated figure, but all of these things together at once and still more. The phenomenon of the classic is not easily circumscribed: the term “classic” can apply to works (The Divine Comedy, Les fleurs du mal), authors (Shakespeare, Cervantes, Austen), characters (Cyrano de Bergerac, Tintin, Emma Bovary), phrases (‘To be or not to be’, ‘Please, draw me a sheep!’), and even narrative motifs (voyage to the moon, lost illusions). What is more, the words designating that which is known and recognized as culturally valuable throughout a given community can vary: we talk of classics, but also of national treasures, of masterpieces of humanity, and of canons.

The present book offers an introduction to the sociology of literary classics, whose premises are founded in the historical sociology of literature, which unseats the conception of literature as object, in favour of a conception of literature as practice over long time spans and within a transnational perspective. The historical sociology of literature belongs to a continuum of sociohistorical approaches to texts and literary history that includes the sociology of literature, the history of literature, social criticism, and cultural history (Aron and Viala 2006; Lyon-Caen and Ribard 2010; Sapiro 2014). Attentive not only to texts and their authors, but also to the mechanisms of the production, dissemination, reception, and appropriation of literature, this field of study views literature as the collective set of texts that are or have been considered, during a given period, as being literary by writers, readers, and other literati (e.g., teachers, critics, publishers, librarians). The approach is further enriched by the contributions of other perspectives, such as the history of social imaginaries, economic sociology, connected history, and material bibliography. By placing at the heart of its analytical perspective the interactions between authors’ creative singularity and the mediating operations of literary creation and reception, the discipline positions itself at the crossroads of history, sociology, and literary studies. The principal object of the historical sociology of literature is the—always collective—production of the social value of texts.

In the United States, the choice and use of classics in college and university classrooms have been objects of intense debate in what has come to be termed the “canon wars.” In the French-language media space, the defences and illustrations of classics have been numerous. In less visible fashion, one research current has taken a sociological approach to classics and their “classicization,” or canonization, beginning with the work of Alain Viala (1988; 1993). Indeed, there is no shortage of recent work on questions surrounding literary classics. The present short introduction to the sociology of literary classics draws on a diversity of research currents and approaches, including studies in education, communication and information sciences, digital humanities, history (including its social, cultural, economic, and political specializations), sociology, and literature studies. The first ambition of the present volume is to present a synthesis of the various contributions to the reflection on classics—contributions originating from diverse languages, regions, and times. This book aims also, in the midst of controversies swirling around the toppling of statues of “great men,” to question the phenomenon of the classic, in terms both of social practices and of their attendant imaginaries.

The phenomenon of literary classics raises questions of various order: How do certain cultural objects, concepts or people become classic? How is that status maintained? Which intermediaries act on the collective elaboration of classics? What is the role conferred upon literary classics in public policy, in schools, in libraries, and elsewhere in the public space? What uses, appropriations, adaptations, and transformations do readers enact on classics? This book will seek answers to these questions in the course of four chapters. Chapter 1 discusses the nomenclature of the classic and traces the history of the recurring interrogation: “What is a classic?” The second chapter draws the outlines of a sociology of how classics become classics based on an exploration of the mediations that act on literary communication. In order to better situate classics as a “class apart,” this chapter will also consider the effects of the passage of time on the canonization of works and individuals, as well as the various forms of the perceived value of classics and the diversity of their uses. In Chapter 3 we will turn our attention to the various uses, appropriations, collections, and republications without which the classic would not exist. Chapter 4 is devoted to the cultural, social, political, diplomatic, ethical, and aesthetic functions variously ascribed to classics on national, transnational, and global scales. The fifth and concluding chapter contemplates the insights gleaned over the course of the preceding chapters and reflects on their import in the light of ongoing social and cultural transformations.

Chapter 1. What is a literary classic?

“Classic” has become a generic term that cannot be subsumed within a single accepted meaning. The following pages will trace its etymology and detail its various usages, as well as examine the concept of a literary canon and map the history of reflections on the question of: “What is a literary classic?”

Classics, class, and classicism

“Of the first rank”

The word classic derives from the Latin classicus and its root, classis. In ancient Rome, the adjective form classicus connoted with social class, which was determined by wealth and the concomitant access to voting rights: citizens of the first, and richest, class were called to the vote first, while the proletarii, voted last. In his Attic Nights, in the 2nd century of the current era, Aulus Gellius left the earliest written record of the figurative use of the term classicus scriptor, in reference to authors of the previous era (e.g., Virgil, Ovid, Cicero). Gellius advised that in order to learn the correct usage of the Latin language, one should hold as models these auctores classici or “authors of the first rank.”

The term seems to have fallen by the wayside until its reemergence during the Renaissance, when the word classicus reappeared in scholarly Latin texts. In French, it is first attested (in the acceptation established by Aulus Gellius) in Thomas Sébillet’s Art poétique français [The French Poetic Art] (1548). Subsequently, its use became more current during the 17th century, most commonly as an adjective to qualify past authors and works. By 1690, in Antoine Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel [Universal Dictionary], the word classique had become endowed of another acceptation: the classics, in Furetière’s definition, are those authors “who are read in classrooms, or who command great authority therein.” The reference to school classes was attested as early as 1680, but it is the product of a false etymology.

The word appears to have been popularized first in French, initially as an adjective, then as a nominalized adjective (“our classics,” as Voltaire wrote). Over the course of the 17th century, it appeared in Italian (classico), English (classic/classical), German (klassisch), and Spanish (clásico). However, a very broad diversity existed in the application of those terms when it came to the literary corpora considered, their formal and stylistic qualities, and the historical periods deemed classical (Norman 2018). The term has also entered use in non-European languages. In Japan and Korea, for example, where the use of transliterated loanwords originating in European languages is widespread, the term is rendered as kurashikku (クラシック) in Japanese and as k’ŭllaeshik (클래식) in Korean. In China and India, by contrast, the Western term was not adopted.

An additional layer of nuance in English is the presence of two, very much related, yet distinct terms, both of which the present book explores: classic and classical. When useful, this chapter will address them jointly as “classic/al”. Sometimes used distinctly, sometimes interchangeably, the words have two main acceptations. The first is historical: classic/al may qualify something related to an epoch or period widely considered to constitute a model. Greek and Roman antiquity were first held to represent this standard. In France, the 17th century, broadly identified with Louis XIV’s reign, is known as the siècle classique. England experienced its classical period from the late 17th through the 18th centuries, Germany near the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th, and Russia in the first half of the 19th century. Casting a glance further back through history, we speak of classical periods in reference to Egypt under successive Rameses of the 19th and 20th dynasties (1292-1077 BCE), to China under the Song dynasty (960-1279), and Japan’s Edo period (1604-1868). In each case, the temporal and geographic extents of these distinct periods and cultures continue to elicit historical debate. When one elects, one must select: Greco-Roman antiquity is in practice often taken to mean Pericles’ Athens and Caesar’s Rome, while Roman statuary long served as the standard reference for ideas of what the classics of antiquity should look like, effectively discounting the broad diversity of cultural forms present during those periods (Settis 2004). In English, specifically, the term classical connotes with that which is traditional and firmly established, in the past as in the present: in scientific parlance, for example, a “classical theory” is one that is well established and which can be contrasted with a more conjectural “modern theory.” Classical music refers to musical genres developed during preceding centuries and held up as the aspirational models of musical composition, in opposition to contemporary or popular music. Thus the historical acceptation of what is classic/al relies largely on the test of time.

The second acceptation is normative: that which is classic/al is that which has merited the status, that is, that which is deemed worthy of accession to the distinguished company of other classics and which continues to be seen as such. This may mean something considered to be “of the first rank,” as in the Latin sense of classicus. A classic is also that which is taken to represent a model to be imitated in order to achieve artistic or moral excellence on the same order as the classics of the past. But the conditions required to attain such status can be varied, because appreciations of what is or is not classic/al are largely dependent on cultural, aesthetic, and ideological hierarchies. More specifically with regards to the literary classic, the notion evokes such qualities as the mastery of a purportedly purified form of a language, aesthetic attributes of clarity and measure, as well as pedagogical virtues. Stated in other terms, it evokes conformity with formal and thematic standards attributed to Greek and Latin antiquity, as well as more recent—often nationally defined—classical periods. In its 1929 edition, Dictionnaire Larousse gives the following entry for “Classique”: “Literature that is sober, carefully composed, in which all is balanced, a literature which studies not the exceptional spirits nor singular types of humanity, but rather the general types, a literature which exhibits characteristics of soundness and simplicity, ultimately, a moral literature that condemns vices and extols virtues.” Late 17th-century France provides perhaps the best example: a certain national identity is still considered by many to have found its greatest expression, in an elegant language, imbued with nobility, during the reign of Louis XIV. Works attaining these heights were those of the lineage of Racine, Molière, and La Fontaine, who conjoined certain aesthetic traits (order, clarity, measure, bienséance), universal themes, and active backing from state cultural institutions. In 18th-century England, these same characteristics marked the work of authors such as Samuel Johnson and Alexander Pope.

Thus the historical and normative acceptations of classic/al maintain it in perpetual tension, oscillating between essentialist readings that insist on atemporal values and contextual readings which involve period-specific determinations. In order to distinguish “the ancients” from modern artists and their practice, another term was grafted onto classic/al: that of classicism. As an aesthetic concept, classicism spread throughout European languages over the course of the 19th century in reaction to the rise of romanticism (Décultot 2018). The classicist view held that contemporary writers and artists should model their work on that of their illustrious predecessors, or be doomed to failure. In German, the term Klassizismus designated art inspired by antique statuary. In French, classicisme was tied to Greek and Latin antiquity, while néoclassicisme referred to the revival of those models (Génetiot 2005). In English, the term neoclassical acquired a broader scope, designating a vast European movement encompassing many offshoots, from the Italian humanists of the Renaissance to the “returns to antiquity” of the past two centuries. In the first years of the 20th century, the neoclassicist banner rallied such people of letters as T. S. Eliot in England and Charles Maurras in France, compelled by a nostalgic longing for a literary tradition they believed to be under threat from romanticism and symbolism.

The notions of the classic and of classicism are thus neither stable nor unified in meaning. Rather, they are mutable and prone to multiple shifts of meaning. At play are issues of language, art, literature, collective identity, and the transmission of the social imaginary over time and throughout society. The question of the classic is as artistic and literary as it is political and intertwined with identity.

Against the classic

Eluding ready definition in and of itself, the notion of the classic exists since the 19th century, as the binary opposite of other notions. The century that “invented” the classics of the age of Louis XIV (Zékian 2012) constructed the category for its contrasting effect: the classic is the One from which we distinguish the Other so as to assess by contrast.

From the outset and for much of the 19th century, the term was used to draw attention to its principal antonym: the romantic. In a programmatic chapter of De l’Allemagne [Germany] (1813), entitled “De la poésie classique et de la poésie romantique” [Of classic and romantic poetry], Germaine de Staël (1897 [1813], 198) refused to “consider the word classic as synonymous with perfection.” Classic poetry, in Staël’s view, was that of antiquity, while romantic poetry, born in the Middle Ages, was “that which holds in any fashion to [local] romanesque traditions.” Following on the footsteps of Schlegel and other German philosophers, Staël upended the established European hierarchy of the time: classical literature was for her “transplanted,” in contrast with the temporal continuity between “romantic and chivalrous” literature and Staël’s own age.

A decade later, in Racine et Shakespeare, Stendhal (1962 [1823], 38) calqued the English term romanticism to say that: “Romanticism is the art of presenting to different peoples those literary works which, in the existing state of their habits and beliefs, are capable of giving them the greatest possible pleasure. Classicism, on the contrary, presents to them that literature which gave the greatest possible pleasure to their great-grandfathers”. Romanticism and classicism are irreconcilable in their relationships with the world, with time, and with pleasure. Literary achievement, according to Stendhal, is a relative notion, because it is dependent on reception. Today’s beauty is not yesterday’s. Thus, Stendhal continues, “Sophocles and Euripides were eminently romantic.” Classicism, in this perspective, is defined as the romanticism of the past. In their own time, works may have offered abundant pleasure, but have since declined in both novelty and popular appeal.

In the 1820s, with the emergence of the first Romantic literary circles, the opposition between classic and romantic propagated through the press, largely in condemnations of the latter. Romantic became a byword of conservative elites lambasting its cosmopolitanism, reformism, and excesses. Anti-romantic critiques elevated what had been “classical” to what was now the nominalized “classic.” By around 1830, the “classics” were those individuals who denounced the romantic avant-garde in the name of principles they perceived to be those of 17th-century literature.

Other terms, too, have served as foils for what is classic/al. Historians of medieval architecture have opposed the classical to the gothic, while art historians take recourse to the category of classical so as to distinguish what is baroque. Such divisions are difficult to establish definitively: in painting, for example, the baroque period follows that of Italian Renaissance classicism, but precedes the classical literary period in France. Finally, classical, in the sense of belonging to antiquity, has been opposed to what is modern. This opposition acquired new vigour with the invention of the concept of modernity. According to Baudelaire, in his study of the painter Constantin Guys, entitled Le peintre de la vie moderne [The Painter of Modern Life] (1863), beauty cannot be fully captured, either within the actuality of a given period or in the classicism of masterpieces. The artist’s task consists, in Baudelaire’s words, to extricate from the present that which is worthy of becoming ancient or classic/al. Modernity and antiquity are not, in this perspective, temporal designations since they are at odds within one and the same age. If modernity is by definition a principle in flux, the modern work of art is condemned to be supplanted—to become classic in turn. We can speak of the classicism of the modern age or of the modernity of the classical period, resulting in what Christophe Charle (2011) names a “discordance of times”. This dynamic perception later yielded to a conception of modernity as the age to which we belong, or which we inherited, and whose chronological delineation is ultimately problematic: does modernity open with the fall of Constantinople, with the French Revolution, or perhaps with the First World War? Be it classical, modern, or other, any such term raises difficulties with regards to categorization and dating, because every guiding concept and every periodization is subject to the changing concerns and perspectives of those who write, and rewrite, history.

The canon wars

Many various terms are commonly used to designate literary classics: great works, masterpieces, major works, monuments, as well as other metaphors combining aesthetic quality with social prestige. In English, yet another word acquired significance in this respect: that of canon. Its root is the Greek kanôn, originally meaning a straight bar or measuring rod, later acquiring the figurative meaning of a rule or standard. Dionysius of Halicarnassus seems to have been the first to use the term canon to designate a set of texts, in 400 BCE. Canon subsequently entered the ecclesiastical lexicon as the term for the approved list of books constituting the Bible as it is to be transmitted and, with canon law, for the Church’s very authority. Other cultures developed similar concepts circumscribing the selection of works deemed appropriate for youth education. In China, for instance, from the 6th century BCE, the word jing (經) was used to signify a selection of books set aside as especially important for education. In French, the word has been used from the 18th century onwards in its current sense of a selection of texts or objects which institutions (academies, universities, journals) hold to be foremost in a given field, be it literature, art history, or music. Given its religious connotations, the term suggests a transference of sacrality from liturgical Scripture to literary scripts, that is, a secularization and specialization of “the canon” within the literary, as well as musical, philosophical, pictorial, and other realms.

The concept of a canon has remained largely absent from French literary historiography, yet elsewhere it occupies a central position. In Germany, the publication of Der Kanon, an anthology of German literature edited by Marcel Reich-Ranicki (2002-2006), elicited impassioned reaction. In the United States, the question of canon has been inextricably linked with university teaching, where it signifies first and foremost the set of works underlying course curricula. The canon thus has not only a pedagogical, but also a highly limitative and selective, dimension in relation to the concept of classics (Guillory 1993). The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom’s 1987 bestseller, sparked heated debate across North America. The book’s subtitle, How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, was indicative of its polemical claims: abandoning the Western canon had stunted the minds of university students, rock music had ruined the imagination of youth, and cultural relativism had contributed nothing of intellectual significance for the United States since the 1950s. For Bloom, things had taken a wrong turn in the 1960s, when universities had capitulated to the imperatives of the struggles against racism, sexism, and elitism in the name of a morality whose claims of superior truths Bloom rejected. Reactions swiftly coalesced around adherents and detractors of Bloom’s theses with a vehemence that retrospectively earned the resulting polemics the name of “canon wars.” These wars set traditionalists, who favoured basing courses of study on classic literary works, against those who argued for the inclusion in curricula of works by underrepresented authors, including women, First Nations, and members of other cultural communities, in order to constitute a canon that would be less White, less straight, less male—in other words, to open the traditional canon to constellations of regional entities and ethnic communities, each with its own literature.

The polemics extended into the 1990s and the 2000s. Undoubtedly as a result, university curricula did begin to include a greater diversity of writers from various backgrounds and cultures. Not without recriminations, literature departments have adopted more open attitudes towards the perspectives of marginalized groups. In practice, two forms of openness were instituted: some previously discounted works were now brought into existing programs and new sub-disciplines were created, such as gender, Black, and Native studies, each with its own classics. One recent depiction of these dynamics featured prominently on the television series The Chair (2021), in which an ageing White male professor of 17th-century English literature finds his methods questioned, and his classes emptied, by a young, dynamic Black female colleague who advocates for a holistic and unconstrained approach to “the canon.”

The canon wars brought to the fore perspectives that questioned literary classics in new ways: when curricula integrate works representative of different communities, should they emphasize the “best” authors of African, Asian, Latino or other origins, or rather those who best exemplify the identity claims of their communities? Moreover, as John Guillory (1993) pointed out, reforming the canon supposes a homologous relationship between the exclusion imposed on marginalized communities and the selection of canonical works. A literary work, however, does not represent characters in the same way that an elected official might represent their constituency. Thus, how does this homologous relationship function? Formulating answers to these questions requires a degree of nuance and close observation of specific situations, because debates surrounding the canon simultaneously concern selection criteria, the reading and teaching objectives of literary studies, the roles of both authors and readers, and the social functions of literature.

Literary classics

We have not quite yet extricated ourselves from the terminological thicket. The classics considered in this book are “literary” – but what should we understand by that term? The authors whose collective work has been attributed to Homer did not write literature as we understand it today, because the very concept did not exist at the time. The Homeric epics, among others, only subsequently and posthumously became literary works, indeed literary classics. Literary studies specialists and dictionary authors have never been able to agree on a definition of literature because any static and restrictive definition is rebuked by the real diversity of productions. What is literary exists as manuscript, as printed matter, published in volumes, journals, blogs, or audiobooks, as social media posts, written as graffiti or on looseleaf, as well as a range of other forms. Although since the late 18th century the term “literature” has referred chiefly to novels, theatre plays, poetry, and essays, a diversity of other cultural productions can be counted as examples of literature, including tales and fables, songs, photo novels, film scripts, haïkus, slam poetry and the storytelling of African griots, among others. No measure of quality judgement, no use of fiction, no set of media allow us to accurately delimit the territory of literature. In this regard, few things have been as instructive as were the polemics occasioned by the attribution of the Nobel Prize for literature to singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, in 2016, in which every opinion seemed to convey a different conception of the limits of what is literary.

If literature cannot be defined or delimited in accordance with rigid criteria of form, content, and mode of transmission – how do we address it? Literary studies have always occupied an unstable position, between the veneration of great works and contextual assessments of literary productions (Maingueneau 2006). In reaction both to textualist approaches (deaf to anything that is not extant in written form) and to contextualist perspectives (attentive only to external determinations), generations of researchers have explored the interactions between the production of books and the production of literary value. The history of books and literary history, both informed by the sociology of literature, have shifted attention away from the form and content of works and toward the production, diffusion, and reception of writing. Many theoreticians of these disciplines make use of electrical circuit metaphors in describing communication processes. Already in the 1950s, Sociology of Literature by Robert Escarpit (1971 [1958]) was organized according to three domains of the communication process, that is: production (writers), distribution (publishers, booksellers, literary and popular circles) and consumption (various publics, measures of success, reading habits). Robert Darnton later proposed a schematic model of the “a communications circuit that runs from the author to the publisher (if the bookseller does not assume that role), the printer, the shipper, the bookseller, and the reader.” The history of books, as conceived by Darnton (1982, 67), “concerns each phase of this process and the process as a whole, in all its variations over space and time and in all its relations with other systems, economic, social, political, and cultural, in the surrounding environment”. This model has been adopted and adapted by multiple authors in analyses of industrial book production, as well as of digital and audio books (Glinoer 2022). For his part, Alain Vaillant (2010) defines literature as an “act of communication” in reference to both oral and written linguistic productions, with the particularity that literary discourse, in this view, implies a certain aesthetic elaboration and does not aim for immediate, circumscribed utility. Le dictionnaire du littéraire [The Dictionary of the Literary] (Aron et al 2002) also places emphasis on the publication and diffusion of texts, as well as on the necessary recontextualization of the variable conceptions of literature and the multiple possible interpretations of literary works. Classics, in particular, can elicit attachment to notions of the past and the wish to project them onto present-day places and social contexts. The value and form of works do not depend solely on their authors, but are constructed throughout each works’ “life,” from initial publication, through subsequent editions, adaptations, and appropriations.

“What is a classic?”

With the foregoing examination of the multifarious meanings of classic/al in hand, we can address the question of: What is a classic? We will begin by exploring answers others have provided to this query, focusing on those that have met with critical approval.

Sainte-Beuve

The first to have explicitly confronted the question was Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve. The literary critic was at the height of his influence when he published “Qu’est-ce qu’un classique ?” [What is a Classic?] in 1850. A member of the Académie française, Sainte-Beuve published a regular column in the newspaper Le Constitutionnel, in which he developed his literary history methods, focused on the texts, biographies, and social contexts particular to the authors about whom he wrote. In the aforenamed article, published on 21 October 1850, Sainte-Beuve first exposed the principal uses of the term: the classic is that which is studied in class or an “auteur de premier ordre.” Sainte-Beuve then placed the century of Louis XIV at the centre of his theme: “The idea of a classic implies something that has continuance and consistence, and which produces unity and tradition, fashions and transmits itself, and endures. It was only after the glorious years of Louis XIV that the nation felt with tremor and pride that such good fortune had happened to her.” An awareness of classics appeared, according to Sainte-Beuve, following those “glorious years,” but the notion had not become stabilized. Sainte-Beuve remarked on the extent to which the definitions given the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française (1835) were coloured by the anti-romanticist viewpoints that predominated within the Académie at the time. Rejecting “restrictive and timid definitions,” he proposed a more broad-minded description:

A true classic, as I should like to hear it defined, is an author who has enriched the human mind, increased its treasure, and caused it to advance a step; who has discovered some moral and not equivocal truth, or revealed some eternal passion in that heart where all seemed known and discovered; who has expressed his thought, observation, or invention, in no matter what form, only provided it be broad and great, refined and sensible, sane and beautiful in itself; who has spoken to all in his own peculiar style, a style which is found to be also that of the whole world, a style new without neologism, new and old, easily contemporary with all time. (Sainte-Beuve 1909 [1851], 129)

Broadening and opening the classical corpus allows one to grasp, in Sainte-Beuve’s view, the “true” classic, implying that the title had in the past been unjustly bestowed: the classic, identified with an individual, rather than a work, is to be considered on the scale of humanity as a whole, rather than that of a single nation. The classic is an author who, says Sainte-Beuve, drawing on the semantic field of economics, has most contributed to enriching the common capital, who has “increased its treasure.” How? By means of a literature of emotions or a literature of ideas, the classic author has “discovered some moral and not equivocal truth,” or has “revealed some eternal passion in that heart where all seemed known and discovered.” Sainte-Beuve’s text refrains from indicating specific literary genres in which classics may be encountered more frequently than in others. Neither did the acclaimed critic prescribe any definite form for classic works, although he did feel that they should tend towards the universal: “broad and great, refined and sensible, sane and beautiful in itself.” Furthermore, the language used by the classic carries a style that is at once specific to the author and appreciable by all, “new and old,” atemporal yet actual, “easily contemporary with all time.” Attaining the universal in both form and substance is, in Sainte-Beuve’s view, the achievement common to all classics (Prendergast 2007).

Only the passage of time can make perceptible the influence wrought by a work and that is why one should be wary of too hastily crowning a work or an author: “How many of these precocious classics are there who do not endure, and who are so only for a while!” In opposition to reactionary thinkers, Sainte-Beuve does not limit the status of classic to authors renowned for literary moderation, such as Boileau, refusing to recognize as classic those who perpetuate such approaches, “writers of a middling order, exact, sensible, elegant, always clear.” The classic “may for a moment have been revolutionary; it may at least have seemed so, but it is not,” because it has altered, for a time, what we call beauty. The classic does not aim to destroy idols, but seeks moral and aesthetic progress: “it only lashed and subverted whatever prevented the restoration of the balance of order and beauty.”

Having stated that “names may be applied to this definition,” Sainte-Beuve first cites the standard personalities: Corneille, Molière, and Racine for the French; Virgil and Homer for antiquity; Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton for the moderns. More surprisingly, however, he then goes on to cite “the poets Valmiki, Vyasa of the Hindoos, and Firdousi of the Persians,” enlarging his discourse to non-European references. As for his contemporaries, Sainte-Beuve abstains from choosing any famous names, preferring to designate only one, “the last of classics in little”: François Andrieux, poet and playwright, deceased in 1833. Despite his relative obscurity, Andrieux may be admitted to the “temple of taste,” which Sainte-Beuve imagines near the end of his disquisition: a mythical place, outside of time, where the great minds would converse in groups, sharing the highest truths of the human spirit. “Usually a corner would be reserved for each of the various nations, but the authors would take delight in leaving it, and in their travels would recognise, where we should least expect it, brothers or masters” (Sainte-Beuve 1909 [1851], 35-138). A temple which each lettered person can admire at leisure – and at distance.

Eliot, Coetzee, and Calvino

Sainte-Beuve’s article made a durable impression on the minds of many. A century hence, it remained in the mind of T. S. Eliot when, in October 1944, as German bombs were falling on London, he delivered the first Presidential Address to the Virgil Society, of which he served as first President, on the theme of “What Is a Classic?” American by birth, having lived in France, and emigrated permanently to the UK, Eliot was at the time an emblematic figure of London’s literary life. He saw himself as a standard-bearer of a neoclassicism that had known its glory days in France, in the years preceding the First World War (Marx 2002). In his address, after acknowledging the polysemy of the term, Eliot stated that he wished to reduce his own definition of “classic” to two qualities: maturity and universality. The maturity is that of the author, that of their language of expression, and that of the civilization from which they originate. Adopting an organicist perspective, Eliot considered that a society acquires maturity in the same way as does an individual (Schlanger 2008 [1992]). An individual needs to reach maturity of both mind and language, but a period must also be mature enough, in literary terms, for a classic author to emerge. In English literature, Chaucer and Pope seemed to Eliot to be among the rare authors who had attained that status, even if modern languages could never aspire to the universality of Greek and Latin. Eliot, however, appears just as restrictive as Sainte-Beuve seemed receptive to different literary cultures. Only the Latin poet Virgil incarnated in the highest measure the qualities of maturity and universality that Eliot (1945) associated with the “universal classic,” reigning unchallenged at the summit of cultural history. Hence, in Eliot’s view, no further progress was possible for European literature.

Let us move another half-century forward in time. South African author J. M. Coetzee was already a renowned novelist, critic, and oft-decorated scholar when he presented his conference paper “What Is a Classic? A Lecture,” in the Austrian city of Graz, in 1991. Some twenty years later, he received the Nobel prize in literature and became an Australian citizen. Coetzee’s lecture was an extension of T. S. Eliot’s address. More precisely, Coetzee was struck, upon reading the address, by Eliot’s lack of reflexivity with regard to his American origins while honouring a European poet (Virgil) before an English audience. Coetzee (1992) perceived therein an attempt by Eliot to play up his position as an American who had succeeded in the British literary world and who espoused a radically conservative political program of European unity under the aegis of the Catholic church. In Coetzee’s view, Eliot’s project implied not only endowing Virgil with an anachronistic European identity, but also associating England with that European identity while failing to address the problematic questions that association implied. In so doing, Coetzee distanced himself from the universalist (i.e. European and colonial) perspective on the classic, moving toward an institutional understanding that integrates the work of people of letters (critics, publishers, scholars) in maintaining the particular prestige given to works considered classics (Mukherjee 2014).

Italian novelist Italo Calvino’s affirmatively titled and reader-centric “Why read the Classics?” (Perché leggere i classici), is perhaps the most widely known introduction to questions surrounding the nature of literary classics. First published in a newspaper by the author of The Baron in the Trees, the text became the preface of a collected volume of Calvino’s reflections on various literary classics: Homer’s Odyssey, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Flaubert’s Trois contes, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, and Francis Ponge’s Le parti pris des choses, among other works. The introductory essay puts forward fourteen definitions formulated as successive additions and reformulations of the first: Calvino viewed the classic from the point of view of reading and rereading, of its effect on the reader, of the intertwining networks linking different classics, and their resilience to the changing present. Toying with the word’s polysemy and its contradictory uses, Calvino (1991) identifies a distinct virtue, one for each definition, of the classic for each of his fourteen definitions, including the pleasure of reading and rereading, cultural influence, and the abundance of resulting commentary.

The sociology of classics

French sociologist, literary scholar, and former professor of literature at University of Oxford Alain Viala in his turn took up the question of “What is a classic?” in 1993, in the introductory article for a special feature of the same name in the journal Littératures classiques. Previously, Viala had published Naissance de l’écrivain. Sociologie de la littérature à l’âge classique [Birth of the Writer: The sociology of literature in the classical age] (1985) which, along with L’institution de la littérature [The Literary Institution] by Jacques Dubois (1978), played an essential role in laying the foundations of sociological approaches to French literary studies. Viala’s article of 1993, influenced by Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological thought, underlined the “eminently social” underpinnings of the determination of classics, particularly in the context of school textbooks and programs. The social processes that turn literary works into classics is, as Viala points out, markedly and simultaneously restrictive, normative, and ideological. While this may be true of classics everywhere, it was, for Viala, especially prominent in the French context, where these processes focus on historical antecedence, aesthetic excellence, and moral authority while tending toward the exclusion of minority voices in the construction of a national identity.

In the face of celebrations of great works and their making, Viala suggested a change of perspective. Rather than studying the circumstances leading to the production of a given work, he turned his attention to the mechanisms of the reception of classics and the norms of their admiration over time. In short, he drew the outlines of a sociology of the processes of the canonization of works. Both terms signify that an object has undergone a process culminating in its entry into an exclusive corpus. Canonicity, therefore, corresponds to a quality that relates both to the work and to the status it has acquired within the body of reference – status acquired, yes, yet uncertain nonetheless. Elevation to the temple of classics is never absolute: there is no fixed and universal form of canonicity, because it is forever contingent on place, time, and subjectivity (Viala 1993). An author or a work becoming classic depends also on institutional structures underpinned by the participation of various intermediaries, including teachers, librarians, publishers, and literary specialists, among others. This results in, as Viala phrases it, “differential” effects of reception: no two individuals derive the same benefits from their reception of a work and those differences of reception broadly reflect and deepen social, and therefore literary, inequalities.

“What is a classic?” served yet again as the title for a treatment of the theme, this time by Cécile Rabot (2018), in a consequential article which sets forth from and broadens Viala’s sociological reflection. Rabot distinguishes no fewer than fifty criteria characterizing literary classics, touching on such aspects as composition (stylistic excellence, universality of worldviews, originality of discourse), reception (place within literary history adoption as model, source of inspiration and reference, broad diffusion, sustained commercial success, abundance of commentary and interpretation), multiple appropriations (the work may be known indirectly, incompletely, in simplified form if it has penetrated into the collective imagination and persists therein through multiform uses and references), and symbolic recognition (the classic work as object of consensus, consecration, and authority as the result of a reversible process of selection. Taking all the above into account, we have taken our typological description of the phenomenon just about as far as is necessary for the purposes of our discussion. The next chapter will draw connections between these and other important contributions in order to explore, in both the realms of practice and imagination, the mechanisms by which a classic becomes such.

Chapter 2. The makings of a classic

Literature is not a purely verbal construct and thus cannot be understood solely in terms of discourse. As such, it ultimately cannot be grasped in terms of discrete sociological, biographical, or other considerations. The sociology of literature rejects the oft-assumed separation of text and context, seeking to illuminate the space between them and therein to uncover the links that tether textual and social phenomena. Eschewing value judgments as to sources, it is interested in all discourses, literary or otherwise, that reveal interpretive elements of the social world.

As an aggregation of classics, the canon is an artefact of the social imaginary (Gagnon 2019): a list of names and without immediate tangible effect but of huge consequences. Literary classics constitute a reservoir of examples, parables, and reference points. Dictionaries and grammar books avail themselves of this reservoir in order to cite exemplary quotations, while economists, anthropologists, legal scholars, historians, and sociologists draw on it to better illustrate their concepts and hypotheses. In addition, certain works continue to develop beyond their original form: time and again adapted, transformed, rewritten, and commented upon, these works become “migratory,” in that they no longer truly belong to any one original or host culture (Gouanvic 2014). The circumstances of their creation become mythical and ingrained in popular culture, as reflected in film, advertising, and humor. The faces of certain writers (Rousseau for a long time, Shakespeare still today) are immediately recognizable. The names of individual characters (d’Artagnan, Cosette, Martin Eden, Oedipus) come to incarnate ideas and values, beliefs and emotions, norms and expectations. Characters and authors can become synonymous with archetypes (Don Juan), syndromes (Peter Pan), and qualifiers (Dantean, Kafkaesque, sadistic). As with jazz standards, we come to know them unwittingly. We spend time with them without having read them.

Representations are not detached from reality: they are two interoperational spaces, in the sense that social reality and the discursive imaginary act on one another. Consequently, we will explore the makings of classics through the study of the mediations of classics and the study of the imaginary of classics so that we may more clearly delineate the symbolic space they come to occupy in communities, cultures, and societies.

Of time and value

Works have a history—a history read differently yesterday than it is today, here or elsewhere, by myself or by another. How might we explain why certain works from the distant past survive far beyond the time and place in which they were born? “[I]s Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine?” Karl Marx (1973 [1857], 109) responded in the affirmative to these questions, but emphasized also the incapacity of historical analysis to determine why works from the past “still afford us artistic pleasure” and even “count as a norm and as an unattainable model”. Given certain propitious conditions, art by its very nature has the potential to transcend its origins and to be rediscovered and appreciated in subsequent periods and by other societies. We may prize art, but it will surely not be for the same reasons or in the same ways as others elsewhere. As the literary theorist Hans Robert Jauss (1982 [1978], 64) stated forcefully: “the form and meaning of a work formative of tradition are not the unchangeable dimensions or appearances of an aesthetic object, independent of perception in time and history”. If we seek to understand the reception of works, rather than only the results of interpretive practice, we must first acknowledge that the form, meaning, and value ascribed to any work will vary according to context.

Some works become “instant classics” but, for the most part, a classic requires time to come into its own. In England, for example, only in the 18th century did Shakespeare become a subject of discussion, after a long interval of silence and not without much criticism of the unequal value of his body of work, in stark contrast to the unanimously laudatory assessments that have prevailed since (Bradford 2015). Posterity can be a “righter of wrongs” (think, for example, of Kafka, for all intents unknown while alive), giving impetus to the notion that the truly important works stand the test of time in the end. As Franco Moretti (2017) points out, Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) is the enemy of all canon theory, because the novel sold badly in its time and afterwards long remained in semi-obscurity as a classic of youth literature. The notion of posterity poses questions for the researcher, such as: how do we think about the enduring recognition of certain works without seeing therein an obvious confirmation of their intrinsic qualities? And: “How do we articulate the uninterrupted flux of historical developments and the sort of indefinite temporal stasis with which we credit every aesthetic canon?” (David 2010).

Having achieved collective recognition, the literary classic, in this tradition of thought, weathers the passage of time. Once it has become such, the classic approaches the eternal, because it is read, reread, cited, and admired through the ages and, as the case may be, across borders. “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say,” wrote Italo Calvino (1986). The works of another—sometimes very ancient—time, classics nevertheless remain actual, because their distinct temporality is that of their perpetual rereadings and ongoing influence.

The work of written art is thus marked by multiple temporalities: that of first publication, that of first reception, that of readers experiencing the work throughout various moments of their existence, and that of the community in which the work is received, adapted, and remade. Conversely, national and other community actors establish canons, purporting to condense collective identities and conferring on themselves a past that is distinct from other possible pasts: “the reconfiguration of the past has the function of retroactively instituting a homogenous temporality, to recast an order of time that permits the thinking of the present” (Zékian 2012, 127). The aim is to define who we are by saying who we have been through the voice of the classics.

Each literary work carries the crossed histories of its editions, receptions, and appropriations. The literary classic, moreover, comes to us charged with the high value accorded to it in the past. Thus time and value intertwine in a kind of virtuous circle: the more a text is reputed to be of value, the longer it endures through time and, by the same token, the longer it endures, the greater the value we accord to it on faith of our predecessors’ judgments (De Guardia 2013).

Indeed, the question of value is central to our present discussion. Umberto Eco formulated an excellent absurdist illustration of the perception of value in the form of an imagined publisher’s letter rejecting Dante’s manuscript for the Divine Comedy. The Florentine author is dismissed as “your typical Sunday writer (in every-day life he’s an active member of the pharmacists’ guild).” The fictional publisher disparages Dante’s use of “his local dialect” rather than Latin and ultimately deems the work to be the “linguistic hash of the post-moderns” (Eco 1988, 37-38). The value of the work has become evident over time due not only for its extraordinary qualities, but fundamentally also to its repeated circulation and the authority of those who have asserted that value. Indeed, the consensus on the value of classics is proportional to the uncertainty of the value of new publications. No one can know a priori what is the best interpretation of a symphony, nor what will prove to be the best novel of a given year (Karpik 2007). Each cultural production is, from its inception, subject to uncertainty as to its aesthetic, social, and economic value. The role of literary institutions, as we shall see below, consists in conspicuously attributing value to cultural actors and products.

Just as there exists a multiplicity of adjectives denoting acquired status (great, classic, legitimate, sacred, canonical), a diversity of terms also designate social value in the literary domain. And the register most frequently employed has something of the religious—indeed a panoply of originally religious terms have entered the literary vocabulary: canon, inspiration, consecration, exegesis. The sociology of art conceptualizes a “social magic” surrounding artists and their works. Art is perceived as a sacred domain and, as Bernard Lahire (2015) explains, as such, is distinct from profane and mundane activities. In secularized societies, the sacred has not disappeared—it has simply been rendered invisible. But the history and sociology of the collective beliefs underpinning our social world reveal that which remains sacred, notably through analyses of works of art and their trajectories (Lahire 2015). Let us take for example the “consecration” of classics. Consecration is defined as the act of establishing something as sacred, of ascribing divinity to a place or object by way of specific rites. In Catholic liturgy, consecration is the moment in the Divine Office when the priest symbolically ensures the transubstantiation of the host into the body of Christ and that of wine into divine blood. This process of transformation of the material into the spiritual invariably retains a degree of mystery, as does the making of a classic (Denis 2010).

The concept of value, for its part, originates in the vocabulary of economics. Pierre Bourdieu harnessed it to his analysis in Les règles de l’art [The Rules of Art] (1992), in which he discussed value as it is expressed in terms of economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital, which is accumulated and transmitted, generating symbolic and monetary profits. Many have been the attempts to measure literary value. Nathalie Heinich (2017, 19), for her part, endeavors a typological approach in Des valeurs [On Values], which aims to examine “the principles according to which [people] accord value to certain objects” or individuals. Heinich’s pragmatic sociology is couched in a typology of recognized value that includes such elements as forms of valorization, as well as intrinsic and statutory qualities (age, gender, race).

Bourdieu (1984a [1979], 110) spoke also of “legitimacy,” a term originating in the language of law and applicable, in his view, to “an institution, action or usage which is dominant, but not recognized as such, that is to say, which is tacitly accepted”. That which is legitimate is that which is established as self-evidently valid and thus beyond debate. Social actors, in Bourdieu’s analysis, are “recognized” by others, who are themselves considered legitimized to accord recognition.

The notions discussed above, moreover, can be graduated: from recognition to pantheonization, from emergence to canonization (Dozo et al 2016), from legitimation and consecration (Dirkx 2017). No matter the term, however, a difficulty remains: success and failure are one-dimensional, but the forms and effects of hierarchization are complex and multidirectional. Neither blacklisting nor elevation are ever final since the very definitions of what constitutes legitimate literature are subject to perpetual reevaluation and because the social space is heterogeneous. “We cannot act,” writes Lahire (2003, 53) “as if a continuity of cultural beliefs existed in all the parts of the social world, as if all social groups tended to align with the legitimate consumptions of the most ‘cultivated’ members of the intellectual fractions of the dominant class”. It is more productive and more prudent, given the relative uncertainty that weighs on aesthetic value, to conceive of multiple scales of legitimacy arrayed with multiple and diverse gradations that acknowledge such dimensions as gender, epoch, place, and community (Vaillant 2010). Legitimacy, therefore, can no longer be thought of as a fixed homologous relationship, but must rather be viewed as a process: a classic is not born as such, it must become such. Every social field involves a process of legitimation whose trajectory is dependent on the dominant value regime in that field; at the same time, this process of legitimation contributes to define the terms of that domination through a set of reciprocal determinations.

Classics, however, have not merely accumulated more symbolic capital than other actors in the literary field. They are not only recognized—they are known. Indeed, yet another terminological procession is necessary to characterize their status: celebrity, visibility, glory, popularity. Since the Enlightenment, certain public figures have been known to their contemporaries (Lilti 2017 [2014]). The 19th century, in particular, developed a speciality in gossip surrounding prominent personalities, many of them writers. In turn, the literati responsible for the transmission of value have often been wary of seeing the attractiveness of the present, of fashion, and of the public image of celebrated personalities take precedence over works and their posterity. Shakespeare, Voltaire, George Sand, and Dostoevski not only occupy a superelevated position, even today, on the scale of literary legitimacy, but are also personalities whose portraits and surrounding myths are familiar, notably because of educational mediation.

The collective production of classics

How does a work, an author, or a literary movement accede to legitimacy, recognition, or consecration? How does consensus build around a work along its consecration trajectory? To answer these questions, we will once again take up the metaphor of communication in order to consider the entire length of the circuit leading from emitter to receptor.

Mediations

Cultural objects do not materialize spontaneously or inexplicably. On the contrary, they are the fruit of the labour of a multitude of people, practices, and organizations. Between author and reader, pivotal roles are performed by the intermediaries of literary production, distribution, and reception. And examining these roles is integral to fully grasping the circuit of literary communication, both as it has been in the past and as it is today. As we will see below by examining specific examples, we can reconstitute the “chains of publication” (Jouhaud and Viala 2002, 6) through which text is transformed into book and acquires the attributes of value in a competitive environment, whether it is upstream of creation (as a text circulates among the hands of many actors, including advisers, publishers, journal editors, and professional readers) or downstream of creation (as choices are made as to form and format, inclusion or not within a series, and marketing).

If we are to take these mediating activities into full consideration, we must at the same time examine the social conditions and collective nature of production of literary works. In order to do so, we must first seek to integrate Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field and Howard Becker’s concept of art worlds. The making of any cultural object requires both the collaboration and the competition of social actors. A field (whether literary, artistic, intellectual, or other) is, according to Bourdieu (1992), a system of relations between “agents”, whose interactions are determined by the power relationships implicit in their relative positions in the field. From the perspective of the sociology of fields, collaboration and solidarity exist, but competition for dominant positions within any field makes it so that unity is only ever a temporary means through which to strengthen one’s position. Yet conflict cannot be the sole means of the production of works of art. Highlighting the communal aspects of creation, Becker’s (1988 [1982]) concept of art worlds defines art as the product of collective action coordinating the activities of multiple actors, including not only artists themselves, but also technical intermediaries, mass media, and the state. Pierre Bourdieu’s constructivist and Howard Becker’s interactionist sociologies have since been reconciled and multiple studies have discussed the intermediaries of artistic work (agents, managers) and those of the art market (publishers, press attaches), as well as the prescriptors of culture (critics, experts, juries) (Lizé et al 2011; Jeanpierre and Roueff 2014).

The concept of mediation, prevalent in the sociology of art (Hennion 2007), is fundamental to the historical sociology of literature. Books and, indeed, all texts are always dependent on a set of mediating actions performed by diverse social actors. When we hold in our hands an edition of Homer’s Odyssey, we are reading the collective work of a scholarly publisher, a translator, an editor, a commentator, an illustrator, an iconographer, a graphic designer, a printer, as well as many others performing a range of support functions (Rabot 2017), some socially visible, some not, including assistants and various labourers, for example. Mediations may be performed by individual or collective actors through practices, media (print and audiovisual), and technical or graphical devices (the paragraph, the page, the cover, the paper, the digital click). The mediations performed by these actors are decisive in the transformation of the text into the as-yet-unpublished book. Introducing corrections, attributing a title, amending the margins, selecting paper grade—all necessary operations of “text-making” and “book-making” (Chartier 2013), designed to meet the expectations of a particular readership. Once a book is published and disseminated, the text is subjected to diverse mediations which infuse its meaning, interposing between it and the reader successive layers of reading and interpretation. Subsequently, “cultural mediators” (the term is generally accepted in designating librarians, museum guides, and cultural presenters) work to connect the literary work with various audiences. What is more, every republication (e.g., as paperback, in abridged form, in special editions, as excerpts in classroom anthologies) once again mobilizes an entire series of creative mediations.

Ultimately, what counts is not the (either human or nonhuman) aspect of any mediation, but its outcome. In this respect, Bruno Latour (2005, 39) suggested distinguishing between the intermediary, who “transports meaning or force without transformation,” and mediators, who “transform, translate, distort, and modify meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry”. A text undergoes “trans-formation” during each act of mediation: each edition subjects it to material, visual, and discursive metamorphosis. This is especially evident in the work of the editor and the publisher. Publishers, as the first expert readers of a work who also wish to include it in a publishing project, perform acts of early reception. Editorial enunciation is perceptible in more or less discrete traces: choices of format, illustrations, and layout, as well as the production of the paratextual devices designed to assist in the reading of a work, including vocabulary notes, maps, historical commentary, and biographical information (Souchier 1996; Ouvry-Vial 2010). No linear succession of intermediaries links object and reader within this perspective. Rather, the text undergoes a polyphonic, thus collective, enunciation.

However, all are not equal before mediation and sociologists following in Bourdieu’s footsteps emphasize a hierarchy of mediating functions. Pascale Casanova (2010 [2002])distinguishes three tiers: “ordinary mediators,” that is, common workers, most often invisible in literary history; “charismatic consecrators,” who are creators and whose power to consecrate depends on the degree of their own consecration; and “institutional consecrators,” generally affiliated with academic establishments, who ensure works’ endurance by including them in programs, curricula, textbooks, and online collections. The activity of mediators consists in reducing the margin of uncertainty as to the value of a work by foreseeing its reception. “Within the apparatus of literary value production,” writes Delphine Naudier (2004, 60), “the division of tasks is segmented, from the producer of a text to its receiver. Intermediaries participate each on their own level in the imposition of belief in the value of a presented work”. In sum, as Olivier Roueff puts it, mediators “connect supply with demand, practically and prescriptively, [and] attempt to control the conditions of reception.” They contribute to reduce the complexity of the enigma that is artistic value (Roueff 2013). Mediators are the authorized agents of the consecration process that reinforces their own authority. The mediating action of social actors is all the more likely to be rewarded symbolically because mediators possess significant symbolic capital. Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier, as Pierre Bourdieu showed (1979). In other terms, whoever takes up a position, posits a choice (the reader’s choice of a book at the shop or the library, the publisher’s decision to include a writer in their catalog, the author’s attempt at a new literary genre, the graphic designer’s preference for one or another illustration, the BookTuber’s selection of novels to compare) and participates in the legitimation of a given work, but at the same renegotiates their own symbolic position. The game of mediations and reciprocal classifications is played in perpetuity.

Literary institutions

Among the mechanisms of mediation, one emerges as especially instructive for the study of the construction and distribution of value: the institution. This polysemic term can variously designate a social practice elevated as a value (the moral right to one’s creations), the process through which that practice is durably established (voting of copyright protection laws), and the acting authorities that regulate that practice (tribunals) (Robert 1989). Encompassing parts of all these meanings, the literary institution designates the set of norms, codes, and customs that govern the creation and reading of literary works.

The literary institution, as conceptualized by Jacques Dubois in L’institution de la littérature (1978), is the historical process through which literature has become a recognized social form, within which norms defining literary legitimacy are established. As Dubois points out, one of the particularities of the literary institution, in contrast with others, is that it lacks a definite charter or code and acts on practices in more indirect ways. Parallel to the literary institution, equally imperceptible and pervasive, Dubois (1986 [1978], 82) perceives a certain number of “authorities,” understood as institutional mechanisms “fulfilling a specific function in the elaboration, definition, and legitimation of a work”. Two types of authority are apparent: “extraliterary” (family, school, censorship, commerce) and “literary,” more specific and acting on particular points of the trajectories of works and their authors, such as their emergence (literary salons and circles, journals), recognition (critical acclaim), consecration (prizes, accession to a literary academy), and conservation (curricula).

Along similar lines of thought, Alain Viala (1993) described four stages of accession to classic status: legitimacy rests on public success and recognition by recognized authorities in the literary field; emergence signifies entry into a first form of legitimacy; consecration situates the work or author yet higher; and the phase of perpetuation corresponds to incorporation, ante- or, more frequently, post-mortem, within dictionaries, place names, curricula, and textbooks. The outcome of this heritage-making process is that classics become, in their own right, institutions participating in the elaboration of taste and influencing the actions of literati and general readers.

Let us consider the example of literary prizes and let us narrow that down to France, for instance, where each year over two thousand literary awards are presented. Certain prizes are reserved for specific genres (poetry, detective novels, autobiographies), regions, or identities (women, debut novelists, LGBTQ individuals). Literary awards, indeed, are all around us. They are in fact inseparable from the prestige economy in which cultural goods are exchanged (English 2008), reflected also in film festivals and national academic awards. However, if prizes serve to operate a triage of the mass of available products, stating with authority which book or author was the best in a given year, their proliferation and globalization have generated new layers of classification. By consecrating authors and works, prizes also consecrate their own standing through jury memberships and the prestige of award winners. The value of a work gains social legitimacy through the action of authorities endowed of the power to determine what does or does not have value.

A paradox affecting all literary institutions also directly affects literary prizes: consecration is expressed through the attribution of distinctions, but the literary world is not strictly hierarchical in relation to those distinctions—the greatest writer has not necessarily received the most prizes and even less so the largest monetary awards. Many a classic of literature received not a single distinction at the time of their publication. Consecration is not always commensurate with an abundance of laurels. That is why, as with any other form of recognition, prizes may rouse suspicion. On the one hand, we say that cultural awards reward excellence, provide quality works with visibility, ensure young artists’ patronage, and bridge distances between cultural communities; on the other, we also decry the power struggles that overlay their history, we deride their fallibility, that is their incongruity with our personal canon (such or such middling writer was crowned while another clearly should have won instead), we fret over a system that rewards mediocrity, and contest the market value thus assigned to literature (Ducas 2013). The circular paradox of literary institutions in general, and of literary prizes in particular, is that their authority to continue attributing awards derives from their ongoing attribution of those awards (Heinich 1999).

The Nobel Prize in Literature

Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel (1833-1896) bequeathed his fortune to the creation and bestowal, in perpetuity, of prizes recognizing “those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind,” to be equally distributed between five categories. The prize for literature, Nobel specified, was to be awarded to “the person who [...] produced the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency.” The very first Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded in 1901, two years before the inaugural Prix Goncourt and sixteen years before the first Pulitzer. The prize has undergone inflections over the years, rewarding, for example, authors’ entire bodies of work, rather than recent publications, and not necessarily observing the stipulation of an “idealistic tendency.”

Over subsequent decades, other prizes have adopted the Nobel model, such as the Miguel de Cervantes Prize recognizing Spanish-language writers and the Prix des cinq continents de la Francophonie. None, however, enjoy the levels of renown and prestige conferred by the Nobel.

The mechanisms of attribution are as immutable as they are opaque (Jewell 2000): each year, the Committee of the Swedish Academy selects the winner of the prize in literature. The committee members devote part of their time throughout the course of the year to reading works representing a selection of literature from around the world. Various experts are consulted and, when necessary, works are translated into Swedish. The prize consists of a medal, a diploma, and a monetary award which today stands at over one million euros.

Although no other prize comes close in terms of global prestige, criticism abounds year in, year out. Voices clamor for great writers hitherto overlooked and question the reasons for their apparent repudiation (was Paul Claudel too religious? Bertolt Brecht too Marxist? Virginia Woolf too experimental?). Other critiques have denounced the prize’s Eurocentrism: the overwhelming majority of winners have been European, while Latin America had to wait until 1945 to see Gabriela Mistral crowned as its first winner, and Africa as late as 1986, when Wole Soyinka was declared the laureate. As recently as 2022 the awarding of the prize to Annie Ernaux gave way to a torrent of debate, as if the decision of the Swedish Academy were subject to validation by French writers and critics. Clearly, even the prestige machine can produce only in proportion to the value it is perceived to hold.

Reception

Studies of reception focus primarily on the central role of the reader—and, in broader terms, the recipient of literary communication—in the making of meaning. Each reader receives each text in their own unique fashion determined by a variety of factors, including their education, life experience, and objectives. In this perspective, reading practices are not the end point of the circuit, but rather gateways to broader sociological analyses. Rejecting the notion of a fixed original text, the reception approach proves especially useful for the study of the classics of antiquity, which have often survived in only fragmentary form and have been the subject of discussion and interpretation by many generations of erudite readers. At times even the original source may be contested, forgotten, or otherwise ignored. The Iliad is known today almost exclusively indirectly and Homer’s existence as a historical individual has come into doubt. Generations of receivers-cum-mediators have maintained the vitality of Homeric works’ legitimacy by way of countless posthumous uses and appropriations including commentary, re-editions, and allusions. In any case, classics are separated from those who admire them by a span of time, even if sometimes brief: a work becoming a classic involves its active and dynamic reception by a plurality of individuals over a relatively long time. The history of the transmission of classics can thus be understood as an endless chain of productions and receptions.

Long the poor relation to literary studies, the study of the reception of works developed during the 1970s within the theoretical perspective of semiotics, in particular in the writings of Umberto Eco in Italy, and historical hermeneutics, led by Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser in Germany. Both authors proposed approaches centred on the relationship between text and reader, and more precisely on the reactions of various publics, specialized or otherwise, to texts and their aesthetics. For example, using literary critiques as his sources, Jauss (1990 [1978]) examined the French public’s horizon of expectations when Flaubert’s Madame Bovary was published in 1857, and its links to the book’s subsequent censorship. This approach, however, encounters a fundamental methodological difficulty in the form of a superabundance of discourses on readings by professional readers (literary critics, intellectuals, scholars) and the contrasting paucity of traces left by general readers, at least until the contemporary era. It would be erroneous to conflate the two categories. Roger Chartier’s (1995) social history of reading shows that readers’ ordinary uses of texts are never reducible either to the supposed intentions of the original producers or the judgment of select experts. As well, Chartier (2009, 322) notes, we must not amalgamate books and texts because “texts do not exist by themselves, outside of the materialities that are its media and carriers. Against this abstraction of texts, we must remember that the forms that make it possible to read, hear, or see them also participate in the construction of their meaning”.

Rejecting notions of the verticality of taste, cultural theorists (predominantly American and British) have devoted much attention to general readers and viewers in order to more fully grasp the aesthetic experience in relation to characteristics such as social group, gender, ethnic origins, and age. Stuart Hall, in his article “Encoding/Decoding,” showed that the operation of a medium cannot be explained solely in terms of mechanical transmission between sender and receiver as between binary poles. Once encoded, a message must subsequently be decoded, and that operation will happen differently in relation receivers’ varying social characteristics and experiences (Hall 1980). The reception experience is now no longer passive and has become active, even creative of value and meaning: each act of reception potentially remakes an art object’s interpretation. In this view, the meaning of a work exists only as a multiplicity of diverse and potentially contradictory interpretations. The text, therefore, in what we suppose to be its final form, is subject to all the “semiotic uses” that are destined to construct its meaning (Esquenazi 2007).

The sociology of reading has sought to correlate readers’ social categories with preferences, uses, and ways of reading. The primary sources of this research have been quantitative and qualitative surveys of reading practices, sometimes targeting specific demographics, such as workers or youth. This body of research has shone light on such dimensions as the social uses of reading (Mauger et al 1999), various ways of demonstrating one’s identity as a reader, the modes of appreciation, classification, and interpretation of works, as well as on participation in reader communities (Barth-Rabot 2023).

Alain Viala (1993), for his part insisted on the notion that a work’s becoming classic coincides with the acceptance of its indisputable (because persistently reiterated) status as a masterpiece. Stated another way, a work becomes a classic when readers in the present can no longer perceive the aesthetic distance that once marked the work for its contemporaries. Madame Bovary may have shocked readers in 1857, yet was subsequently unanimously lauded in literary circles. In the same spirit, in order to understand the fluctuations of literary value over time, some literary researchers have recently addressed the trajectories of works over the longue durée, the forgetting and rediscovery of works, and various modes of actualizing the literary past. Stéphane Zékian (2012; 2014), for example, has examined the 19th-century reception of 17th-century authors, while Delphine Antoine-Mahut (2021) has delineated philosophy’s canonization of Descartes. Specialists of ancient literatures have built this line of analysis into a full-fledged field of research, as attested by A Companion to the Classical Tradition, a volume among whose stated aim is to explore the impact of ancient classics on postclassical culture (Kallendorf 2007).

Book histories

If we accord due attention to every link in the life chain of a book, we can write its history—the connected history of the production, commercialization, and reception of that book. Clayton Childress (2017), for example, did just that for the historical novel Jarrettsville by American author Cornelia Nixon (2009), tracing its evolution from Nixon’s writing sessions in a Starbucks cafe in Berkeley, California, through editorial meetings at the book’s publisher, Counterpoint Press, to reading groups that eventually formed throughout the US, bringing readers together to share their appreciation of the book. Childress used a variety of sources, including direct observation and interviews, as well as the author’s and the publisher’s archives (emails, edited pages, potential covers). With some methodological adaptations, the same approach is feasible for older works: Jean-Charles Geslot (2022) has traced the stages of the trajectory of Victor Duruy’s Histoire de France (1860), from the book’s genesis to testimonies of reception by students, villagers, and clergy, passing through the printing and binding processes, to the book’s distribution in libraries. Álvaro Santana-Acuña, for his part, examined how Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) became a global classic thanks to the combined influence of mediators in Latin America and Europe, a flourishing publishing house, and the author’s personal network of relations. In addition to historical sources, Santana-Acuña (2020) collated over five thousand online comments, in nine languages, posted by readers on booksellers’ websites. These examples of holistic approaches to both the material and the symbolic making of literature provide highly effective templates for further literary research. Among their other merits, they remind us the making of a classic is a complex historical process.

The multiple stages of the transmission of books, particularly those considered classic, show that the production of value is dependent on numerous mediations and cannot be grasped immediately or easily. Our access to classics is mediated by the material objects which convey their texts and by the multiple layers of discourse and representation that surround them.

Imagining the classics

The literati’s word

In the collective production of classics, masterpieces, works of genius, canons, and all other expressions of enduring grandeur, one type of mediator holds a preeminent role. Let us call them the literati. “Who are the literati? Those whose physical and intellectual existence is ordered around texts and books: living among them, living through them, employing one’s own life to ensure that they live, and, in particular, reading them” (Marx 2009, 11). In other words, the literati are those to whom we, readers, delegate the power to say with authority what constitutes a classic, because their vocation, and often profession, is to study, teach, edit, comment, collate, and preface the classics and, in so doing, to celebrate them. Viewed yet another way, the activities of the literati—teachers, researchers, editors, prefacers, librarians, booktubers—are justified by the existence of a literary tradition that must be transmitted. Literati are intimately linked with the transmission of the canon. They play an active role in its elaboration, as well its evolution over time: the republication of works, the publication of learned opinion, the establishment of societies of friends, the development of official websites, and the foundation of specialized scholarly journals are among the operations through which literati ensure the dissemination of classics, rewrite literary history, and ultimately contribute to construct the social importance of literature. Their social status depends to a high degree on the authors, works, and periods in which they specialize. The prestige of classics “radiates onto all those who take hold of them, comment on them, or are inspired by them, demonstrating simultaneously that they own them and that they can appropriate them in order to recreate them” (Rabot 2017).

Martin Bodmer’s collection

Among the literati, Martin Bodmer (1899-1971) was surely one of the most devoted to the cause of classics of world literature. Born into a well-to-do Zurich family, Bodmer developed a bibliophile’s passion for literature already in adolescence. In the course of collecting rare editions of his favourite authors’ works, Bodmer undertook from a young age a variety of mediating initiatives: he created and financed the Gottfried-Keller prize, with a view to supporting Swiss literature, and edited the journal Corona, which published writings by the elite of European literature. The rise of Nazism led him to volunteer with the International Committee of the Red Cross, assuming its vice-presidency in 1947. But it is through his personal collection, at Cologny, near Geneva, that he made his principal contribution to posterity. Beginning with his personal library and a manuscript collection purchased from Stefan Zweig, Bodmer founded the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, which he intended to represent the quintessence of world literature—a refuge for beauty, humanism, and intelligence in the face of the perils of the 20th century. The collection became the great work of his intellectual life: he experimented with original cataloguing methods and, in long-unpublished notes, he elaborated a hermeneutics of collecting and a reflection on classics (David 2018). Today, the Bodmer collection is digitized and accessible online at: https://bodmerlab.unige.ch/fr.

By training and by ambition, literati are the primary guarantors of literary classics. Any consensus that emerges as to the value of classics rests ultimately on their personal readings, rereadings, and interpretations. An expert reading is one that combines pleasure with the analytical interests that originate in one’s education. The task of the literati is to interpret and transmit, to the best of their abilities, works whose status as exceptional is already established, without questioning the whys and wherefores of that status. The indisputability of the classic springs from its capacity to generate its own evaluations: because it has been read and appreciated in the past, because it has survived, it has proven its own necessity for the present. Philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (2004 [1960], 290) saw the classic as the prototype of all historical mediation between past and present: “What we call 'classical' does not first require the overcoming of historical distance, for in its own constant mediation it overcomes this distance”. Thus, the classic text is open to infinite interpretation and only an exegete would be in a position to complete the always-incomplete work, in accordance with their own ambition and erudition.

French writer Charles Dantzig (2013), author of “dictionnaires égoïstes” [selfish dictionaries] of French and world literatures, makes light of literati posturing in his essay À propos des chefs-d'œuvre [On Masterpieces]. Among various characteristics of the classics, Dantzig reflects on their seemingly miraculous creation, their atemporality, their capacity to inspire other writers, their dimension of indisputability, and their entry into the community of masterpieces as reflected in the internal library of the literato (Marx 2020). The indisputability and ahistoricity of classics allow for comparisons on an equal footing of works representing vastly different cultures, periods, and genres. Only the judgement of the literati, as sanctioned by literary and educational institutions, is to be believed. And it is, indeed, a question of belief: belief in the immutable and universal value of the classic, and belief in the (if only residually) sacred character of “Literature with a capital L” due to “its exceptionality, its incommensurability with other discourses of the world, and its privileged access to truth” (Meizoz 2023, par. 1). The selection, always an abstract practice, of works with which the literati elite maintains an intimate relationship corroborates the entire system of literary legitimation. Or, in the words of Pierre Bourdieu (2000 [1997], 30, 48), who, in Pascalian Meditations, critiqued the “routine of educational transmission” and the “liturgical reading” of classics: “The priests of the philosophical cult are jealous defenders of their monopoly of the history of philosophy, which is thus kept from the profane hands of historical science. They subject canonical texts, eternized by the forgetting of the historical process of canonization from which they spring, to a dehistoricizing reading”.

The admiration of classics by the legitimized proclaimers of legitimacy performs more than a solely social function: it both influences and consecrates the literati, who read, reread, translate, and edit texts. The links of admiration and influence have had a fundamental incidence on “the memory of works,” as Judith Schlanger (2008 [1992]) underlines: the Greeks’ admiration of Homer, that of the Romans for the Greeks, the Renaissance’s admiration of antiquity, and so on, have played a determinant role in the history of art and literature. What would Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas (1838) be without Pierre Corneille? What of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) without Hugo’s theatre? It is by the light of their influence that we recognize the greatest works. Harold Bloom (1994), in The Western Canon, describes three criteria of canonicity: first, a writer’s or text’s capacity to transcend or subsume tradition by articulating new frameworks; second, the capacity to incite the reader to reread a text; and third, the capacity to influence literary practices in relation to past, present, and future. The model is, therefore, individualistic: the relationship happens between the literati, frequently writers themselves, and the works they read, reread, and admire. The outcome of the relationship established between a literato and a literary work can be happy or unhappy. At worst, immersing oneself in the achievements of a classic work can become frustrating and even paralyzing. Everything has been said and has been said better. How can an aspiring writer not be discouraged when reading Dante, Homer, or Proust? Harold Bloom (1994) spoke of the “anxiety of influence” which authors experience, spurring them to surpass themselves. Thus Mark Twain influenced and inspired Hemingway, as did Henry James for Fitzgerald, as did also Melville for Faulkner. In the best case, as stated in the Metalogicon of John of Salisbury (1159), classics can serve to elevate us “like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants” who can see further since “we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.” By admiring masterpieces, we move closer to their world, which is not altogether ours, so as to live in closeness with literary giants. Through “a form of narcissistic gratification,” in the words of Gérard Mauger (2001, 68-69), “undoubtedly widespread, even if it is ignored as such, reading difficult texts on familiar subjects, in one capacity or another, can elicit the feeling of having written them, having thought like, or having had the same thoughts, having been also in one’s own way, a creator”. Through their privileged relationship with the work of genius, literati come within reach of the consecration which they bestow and to which they aspire.

The culture of exception

The composition of a literary canon is part of, and serves to substantiate, an imaginary of exception. Beyond literary works as such, interpreted outside of their contexts of production and reception, this imaginary of exception relates also to authors and historical periods.

In the Indo-European languages, the notion of auctor includes all those who have the capacity, in the way of gods, to make things out of words. In accordance with these etymological origins, authors (more often male than female) become part of a romantic mythology of their vocation, of self-sacrifice. The figure of the genius, combining singular originality with aspirations to universality, emerged in the 19th century within a “vocational regime” founded on the values of inspiration (as opposed to labour) and innate gift (as opposed to learning) (Heinich 1998). Many sociologists have insisted on the relational dimension of masterpieces and great authors. Like charisma, greatness is a quality recognized by a community as belonging to an individual. Yet before an individual may be considered exceptional, the notion of exceptionality must first accompany the social genesis of greatness (Schotté 2016). The biographies of writers (as with those of politicians, business leaders, and sports figures) unfailingly relate how these individuals were destined from a very young age to stand out from the pack. A naturalizing conception of exceptionality must inevitably seek out unique capabilities from birth, gleaned either from genetic constitution or from interactions with others. Biographical narratives thus take on “the super-signifying coloration conferred upon every behaviour of said artist by the importance of their work when it is a posteriori stabilized by an enduring and broadly, perhaps universally, ratified evaluation” (Menger 2002, 968). When writers become classic, they are made visible, commemorated, monumentalized. The sociology of literature seeks to resocialize the canonized individual and thereby to reintegrate them into the dynamics of the cultural space to which they belonged. A contrario of the exclusive image of the writer as recluse devoted to his or her art, the sociology of the author shows that, from Balzac to Houellebecq, a work of literature arrives already accompanied by an “imaginary author” with specific character traits, anecdotes, and compulsions that form the elements of myth (Diaz 2007). Some authors repudiate the imaginary persona appended to their name, while others gladly embrace it.

The same phenomenon of exceptionalization operates in relation to historical periods. The Spanish Golden Age, Louis XIV’s siècle classique in France, the Italian Renaissance—ages edified by many into inexplicable miracles. Indeed, the very act of attributing names to certain periods equates the making of artifacts (Kalifa 2020). Every denominated era joins a list that is constitutive of a historicist representation of the flow of time. Yet this philosophy of history is founded in the idea that we are living in a period of decline following a past glorious era. In this perspective, humanity, or the nation, or the community, as the case may be, reached an apex at some point in the past and has only degenerated since. The Golden Age myth has been cited ad nauseam by those who wish to designate, delineate, and circumscribe the past as an apogee (Niemeyer 2016). Using notions such as Golden Age, or classic period, or glorious century serves to naturalize both an idealized vision of the past and a depreciative representation of the present.

A class apart

To become classic is to step out of time and into a realm of unalterable social value. A classic, writes Pascale Casanova, “is a work which, in becoming universal, escapes universal competition. The classic, as text or as individual, is that which, acceding to the permanence of eternity, escapes the uncertainty of temporal competition and one-upmanship.” Or, to borrow financial terms, “the classic is, by definition, wrenched from the indecisions and arbitrariness of assessments of literary value” (Casanova 2003, 174). In complex ways, the classic captures the reality of a historical and cultural moment, while transcending that same moment by entering into the lives of subsequent generations. Within the literary field, the classic thus escapes the contingencies of social ageing, reconciling duration and value within a “circular situation where duration is at the same time a test and a mark, a timeframe and a reward” (Schlanger 2008 [1992], 125). However, the process is neither mechanical nor irreversible. A myth may become diminished and perhaps contested. A classic may be downgraded. The classics that endure do so because they are consistently reactivated (i.e., republished, restaged, readapted, reinterpreted) and agreed upon by the literati elite.

A highly useful concept in understanding the lives of classics is that of textual classes. Jacques Dubois and Pascal Durand coined the term in 1988 in order to show that the classification of works by genre corresponds not only to aesthetic criteria (e.g., verse or prose, fixed or other form, literature of imagination vs argumentation), but also to a principle of social distinction. There is a homologous relationship, not between works and social classes—otherwise we would have gained nothing from reflection theory—but between the operations and procedures of classification and distinction as they function in the social world and within the literary institution. There is a reciprocity of action between the social divisions that classify literary works and the classes of readers classified by what they read. By identifying the textual class (always in transformation), we can place the producers, mediators, and consumers of that class of texts on a scale of legitimacy. Every link in the literary chain of production and reception participates in the mechanisms of classification in a way that is homologous with that through which social classes distinguish themselves in contrast with others (Dubois and Durand 1989). A classification struggle, as it were. Within the framework of the (material and symbolic) cultural goods economy, the concept of textual classes allows us to grasp the interplay between the offer of literature and the demand of reading.

The reading of literary history (e.g. that of a linguistic community, nation state, or continent) through the intermediary of textual classes allows us to eschew the calamitous binary of an essentialist conception, which posits that objects have intrinsic value independent of value judgments, and its relativist counterpart, in which value is entirely the product of external determinations. Dubois and Durand positioned their thought in continuity with Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction (1984a [1979]), which examined the sociocultural construction of taste, both in groups and in individuals. Bourdieu illustrated two superposed and homologous spaces: that of social positions and that of cultural goods. Between them circulates cultural capital, of which Bourdieu conceives as a form of currency possessing practical value in the social world. Attitudes, tastes, and values are transmitted within family, school, and other socialization spaces. Literary classics, sitting atop the literary hierarchy, are appreciated first, in Bourdieu’s view, by those agents who are most endowed with cultural capital. This perfect accordance has been critiqued, notably by Bernard Lahire (2004) in La culture des individus [The Culture of Individuals], which demonstrates that legitimated cultural practices are far from a stable norm among the upper classes.

Let us imagine an allegorical map of textual classes: classics would occupy the most exclusive island, where only elite works, authors, currents, and epochs mingle. The guest list will always be subject to change, but some VIPs have a standing invitation in perpetuity. Tourists might pose for selfies. The buildings would be constantly updated, annexes added. The class of classic texts includes those that have stood the test of time and whose value is only marginally, if ever, contested. The consensus of reception surrounding classics enshrines them as carriers of values deemed universal. With each new edition, each adaptation, perhaps with each mention, the status of the classic is reactivated, the chain of mediations mobilized, the institutional value factory is reopened. Literary classics, the products of literary institutions, are themselves a social institution which literati are prompt to defend, serving as springboard for some, refuge for others. Every polemic surrounding the decline of the reading of classics among youth, every online ranking of “great classics,” every celebration of pantheonized authors—all play a part in the perennial reactivation of the imaginary of the classics.

Chapter 3. Producing the classics

There can be no literary classics without the editorial, artistic, media, and other objects that endow them with social existence. Texts cannot exist without material form. And so we will presently turn to the material dimension of the transmission of classics and, in particular, the modes of their production, seeking to better understand the various ways in which literary classics exist in our physical and digital bookshops, libraries, and bookshelves. Picking up on Pierre Macherey’s discussion in A Theory of Literary Production (1978 [1966]), this chapter will distinguish between the material production of the book, the symbolic and intellectual production of the literary work, the combined yet competing activities of various mediators, and the collective production of literature as a perpetually redefined system of signs. Peering beyond the republishings, adaptations, and collections of classics we will discover pantheons, paperlike though they may be.

Editions, translations, adaptations

Let us begin this chapter with a confession I have never read Don Quixote. Such an admission is costly for any literato keen to not see their literary culture be found wanting. Yet I believe that I can claim to know Cervantes’ work. I have read excerpts, I am familiar with quotes, I know Jacques Brel’s song and the musical Man of La Mancha on which it was based, I have seen the statue of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in Brussels, I have watched a documentary on Orson Welles’ and Terry Gilliam’s attempts to adapt it for the screen, I have admired the story’s illustrations by Salvador Dalí and Gustave Doré. I have read Jorge Luis Borges’ Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote, which tells the story of a writer who recreates Cervantes’ story in carbon copy. I know the meaning of “quixotic.” In short, Don Quixote is a book of which I possess a certain knowledge without having spent substantial time in close proximity to its text, a book about which I have even spoken in class… without having read it (Bayard 2007 [2006]). I cite this example to illustrate that, no matter what exegete embalmers might say, a work of literature is never in immediate contact with its reader. It arrives with a layout, comes to us in translation, sometimes accompanied by supplemental text, often within a collection or a list of greatest works. Its original form, if it has survived, shares space with various editions (diplomatic, scholarly, abridged), with adaptations in various media (radio, animation, film, television, online), with expert commentary, with popular culture references and tropes in everyday language, and, ultimately, with the experiences of all who read it. The classic, therefore, no longer belongs to its author, nor to any one person, institution, or specific culture: characters become mythical, narratives become emblematic (look no further than Quixote’s windmills), illustrations embed themselves in memories, and school reading suggestions can have widely varying effects on students’ reading choices. The present chapter is devoted to all the various productions derived from literary classics.

The survival of classics as classics depends on the mass of discourses that surround them. In the words of Brigitte Louichon, the classic work generates texts and discourses which constitute the proofs of its continued relevance and the signs of its “pedigree.” All adaptation, rewriting, and translation endeavors participate in the collective interpretation of any work that has entered the realm of heritage. Louichon (2015) terms these discourses (whether produced within books, graphic novels, films, manga, or any other medium) “secondary semiotic objects”. Whether they may accurately be termed "secondary" merits discussion, however. Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006) represented a turning point in thinking on adaptations by extracting them from the realm of comparative debate (which posits a hierarchy of works and their adaptations), in order to consider them on their own merits, arguing that the temporally subsequent nature of adaptations does not perforce make them subordinate as well as secondary. In Hutcheon’s perspective, an adaptation must be considered as both product and process of creation and of reception: adaptations must be viewed as distinct objects. It thus becomes possible to discover how a work evolves and develops within diverse cultures and media. A sociology of literary classics can derive much benefit from this non-hierarchical, dynamic, and transmedial perspective in which both adapter and adapted, original and offspring, are resituated within mechanisms of cooperation and competition.

The concept of adaptation may be extended to the diversity of its expressions, which, for Louichon, covers all changes in format, genre, and intended audience, including translations, reeditions, and cinematic adaptations. Republished works may be presented in different formats, adorned with new illustrations, appended with explanatory texts, with updated spellings or with altogether modernized language. For Roger Chartier (2015), “text-making” corresponds to the explicit or implicit instructions left by authors to suggest a certain reading protocol, while the “book-making” is the purview of the publisher and printer in relation to layout, text division, and typography. Both produce reception effects: the illustrated edition for bibliophiles and the budget pocketbook edition clearly do not aim at the same readership. In considering “book-making” activities, we must also think of bookbinding, which constitutes one of its more notable elements. Let us consider the example of 19th-century French hardcover editions of Don Quixote. The bound book, as with any physical format, is invested with meanings. The publisher Louis Hachette included Don Quixote in three distinct book series (« Bibliothèque des chemins de fer » [Railroad Library], « Bibliothèque rose illustrée » [Illustrated Pink Library], and « Bibliothèque variée » [Assorted Library]) before publishing a new, deluxe edition. Adorned with illustrations by Gustave Doré engraved by Héliodore Pisan, it was offered in the 1863 Hachette catalogue, in-folio and in-quarto, “richly hardbound” or in “half leather binding with cloth covered boards and gilt edges,” at different prices (Utsch 2020). Classics are consumed in a variety of editorial forms. Inversely, the multiplication and diversity of the classic’s forms of existence within the social world ensure its subsistence: each republication attempts to seduce readers (who today can access a wealth of public domain material in digital form online), here adding a living author’s postscript here, there producing a facsimile of the original edition, elsewhere including a QR code that links to additional material online.

Translation plays a fundamental role in cultural transfer, as the well-established field of translation studies attests. Let us briefly consider some examples highlighting the diverse transformations and their effects that translation, as a form of adaptation, can have upon the reading of classics. Because translation is expensive, translated works are most frequently those that have achieved popular or critical success, or both. When the translated version originates in popular culture, text modifications and plot changes adapted to the target audience are commonplace. For example, The Last of the Mohicans by Fenimore Cooper (1826) was immediately translated into French, faithfully to the original. But, over subsequent decades, the novel was frequently adapted in collections for young readers. The Nathan edition of 1932, for instance, designed for 8–10-year-olds, preserved the original’s sequence of events, but changed the denouement: an appeal to avenge the last of the Mohicans was added in order to close the story on a less despairing note (Gouanvic 2014). In collections more focused on heritage however, respecting the text to the letter is rather the norm. Retranslations of classics can elicit debate. Such was the case in France when a new translation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) appeared in 2020, the same year as the novel entered the public domain in France: in this new translation, for instance, “newspeak” became “néo-parler” while “novlangue” had been used so far. Most often, however, translations appear without commentary and in the relative invisibility of a commission from a publisher.

Furthermore, we must consider the legal and economic dimensions of the various versions and adaptations of classics. The entry of a work or its translation into the public domain opens it up to an array of possible adaptations and transformations. The folk tales published by the Grimms, Andersen, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, and Charles Perrault appeared in uncounted extended, abridged, and variously modified editions before they became world classics (Louichon 2021). Their fairytales have been adapted within national contexts however: the Andersen known in France is not the Danish Andersen, who differs also from the Andersen famous in Romania or Spain, and the differences between them are sometimes quite profound. Disney’s various fairytale adaptations have become world classics in their own right, but have also spawned profuse commentary and unease in the social imaginary as to further alterations (as was the case when, in 2023, Disney cast a Black actress as the Little Mermaid in a live-action film).

These considerations aside, I will now turn to adaptations as such, whose proliferation and diversity provides copious material for study (Arnold-de Simine and Lewis 2020). Let us take once again the example of Don Quixote: in the single decade spanning the years 2005–2015, no fewer than 68 films—including adaptations, continuations, imitations, and documentaries—were produced with the novel as their source material. The majority of these productions originated in Spain and the United States, but others were produced also in Belgium, Canada, Israel, South Korea, Brazil, and Iran (Ardila 2017).

The graphic art of comic books offers an inexhaustible repertory of classical adaptations, whether we think of Japanese manga, American comics, or the Franco-Belgian bande dessinée tradition. The “Classics Illustrated” series, published between the 1940s and 1960s by The Gilberton Company in the United States, played a leading role in this respect, gaining widespread readership. The series adapted literary classics in comic book format. The circulation numbers are dizzying: “Classics Illustrated” adapted 169 works published in 26 languages across 36 countries, selling as many as 250 million copies per year. In 1943, between 10 and 11 million copies of “Classics Illustrated” were sold each month. The endeavour was explicitly aimed at the democratization of high culture: the publishers set out to encourage younger generations to become better and more voracious readers (Matthews 2019). Eighty years later, adaptations of literary classics are again in vogue in manga form, penned by Japanese artists employing the graphic and narrative codes specific to their medium. The “Classiques en manga” collection by French publisher Éditions Soleil, for example, adapts not only literary works, but also classics of philosophy, science, politics, and sociology, including Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and Descartes’ Discourse on the Method. In broader terms, Benoît Berthou (2015) attributes three possible aims to graphical adaptations of classics. First, an adaptation may act as “mediation” of the original, where ambiguities are eschewed in favour of maximum readability. Such adaptations may retain pedagogical objectives, as in the case, for example, of the “Les grands classiques de la littérature en bande dessinée” [The Great Classics of Literature, Illustrated] by French publisher Glénat, in which each volume includes material illustrating the author’s life and work in historical context. Second, an adaptation may constitute a “figuration,” where the link with the original work may be more tenuous. Here, the primary concern is with the graphic processes used to enact a free interpretation of a work, as in Olivier Deprez’s (2018) woodcut graphic novel adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Castle. Third, beyond a certain threshold, when the quantity or nature of transformations are such that a new iteration no longer retains obvious links with the original, Berthou speaks of “visual translation.” Adaptations, let us also recall, may be earnest or parodical, as in the case of the innumerable popular culture representations of the Frankenstein monster.

In addition to adaptations in all their forms, works that have become part of heritage generate “hypertexts,” a term designating all actualizations of a classic in the present day. Imitations, parodies, reinterpretations, and fan fiction are all hypertexts. After all, Virgil’s Aeneid is but a distant descendant of the Iliad, recasting the original’s minor part of Aeneas as its central character. Classics in the public domain lend themselves well to “transfictional” approaches, to use Richard Saint-Gelais’ term for the amalgamation of disparate fictional universes, whether originally envisioned by a single author or not. Saint-Gelais (2011) discerns multiple possible forms of transfictional texts, distinguished by the links they retain with the original fictions on which they are based: diegetic extensions (prequels, sequels, series, and cycles); alternative versions (“counterfictional” reinterpretations, recenterings on secondary characters, retellings from different perspectives, and crossovers between different fictions); capture or reframing, consisting in the annexation of an original diegesis to an encompassing diegesis in order to reinforce the fictional nature of the original (as when, in the second volume of Don Quixote, the titular character and Sancho Panza enter an inn where people are reading the novel’s first volume).

Classics, moreover, engender “metatexts,” such as critical, historical, didactic, or autobiographical discourses and commentary relative to a text or author. Published histories of French literature played an essential role in constructing its image as a continuous stream represented by works and authors considered classic. This was the case, as early as 1799, with Lycée ou Cours de littérature ancienne et moderne [Lyceum, or Course in Ancient and Modern Literature] by Jean-François de La Harpe, which divided literary history into great ages, classifying works by genre and author. The success of this work, long recommended in abridged form as standard reading in French secondary schools, contributed to establishing an enduring hierarchy between the Age of Louis XIV and other periods of French literary history. This was evident in Histoire de la littérature by Gustave Lanson (1894), which designated the great writers and masterpieces of different periods, and remains so in France today: one need only review registries of PhD dissertations, or literary supplements, or social media. Literary criticism in all its forms plays a fundamental role in the hierarchization of literary value.

Metatexts may develop a degree of autonomy in relation to the source work. Linguist Roman Jakobson and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss published an analysis of Baudelaire’s poem “Les chats” [Cats] in 1962, in the anthropology journal L’Homme. The publication set off a chain reaction that saw nearly thirty articles by German, American, French, Italian, Romanian, and Canadian researchers succeed one another, engaging in a debate on methods, the gist of which was to ascertain which literary approach was best suited to treat Baudelaire’s poem. Was it structural poetics, semiotics, social criticism, thematics, psychoanalysis, or perhaps literary history? Everyone stuck to their positions, but the corpus of disparate commentary itself became the subject of publication (Delcroix and Geerts 1980) and was subsequently included in curricula. Another example is the 2009 edition of the complete works of Lautréamont as part of the “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade” collection by French publisher Gallimard: no less than three hundred of the volume’s total eight hundred pages are taken up by studies of the writer’s work by other authors, including André Breton and Philippe Sollers.

Brigitte Louichon (2015), for her part, groups within a distinct category the mass of allusions and conscious or unconscious references to classicized works, whether in literature or in social discourse more broadly. To attain such status, classics need not only fill our bookshelves, but must also infiltrate our day-to-day lives (Melançon 2020).

The many falls of the house of Usher

Let us summarize, however incompletely (Glinoer 2016), the various continuations of a famed short story by Edgar Allan Poe to illustrate the above. Among Poe’s works, The Fall of the House of Usher has permeated Western culture perhaps more than any other, save perhaps for The Raven. The narrative density of the story, which can be condensed to a handful of scenes (the narrator’s arrival at the house, his evenings with Roderick, the death of Madeline, her entombment, and the appearance of her ghost, the escape, and the titular fall of the house), is certainly instrumental to its appeal, as is the aura of mystery which surrounds its narrative arc and protagonists (what sickness ails Madeline, what is the nature of her troubled relationship with her brother, what is the role allotted to the narrator, and, ultimately, why does the house crumble upon the death of the last Usher?). Playing on generic codes of the gothic novel, the story emphasizes depictions of horror, cruelty, and neuroses in particularly chilling style. Published in Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in Philadelphia in 1840 (after initial publication in a literary magazine), The Fall of the House of Usher, as with the bulk of Poe’s work, took time to gain notoriety. France, in fact, proved an exception to this rule, following Baudelaire’s (1855) much celebrated and sublime, if not entirely faithful, translation of Poe’s writings.

Beginning with the late 19th century, a growing number of literary works took inspiration, explicitly or otherwise, from Poe’s story. Literary scholars have pointed to dozens of allusions on both sides of the Atlantic. In France, Maupassant brought his narrator in Apparition (1883) to an ancient castle where he sees before him a beautiful, but recently deceased, woman; Huysmans wove an explicit thread, in À rebours [Against the Grain] (1884), between the character of Des Esseintes and Roderick Usher; Émile Zola in Angéline ou la maison hantée [Angéline, or The Haunted House] (1898), pastiched the opening paragraphs of Baudelaire’s translated La chute de la maison Usher. On the British and American side, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898) centered on a protagonist whose tortured psyche carries more than a little resemblance to Roderick Usher’s; but it is especially to Howard Phillips Lovecraft that we owe homages to Poe’s story, notably in Pickman’s Model (1927) and The Haunter of the Dark (1936). Reminiscences of Usher abounded elsewhere as well. German author Thomas Mann, in Buddenbrooks. Verfall einer Familie [Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family] (1901), took up the themes of the physical and social disintegration of a house in the guise of a young aristocrat’s story. In China, meanwhile, Li Jian-Wu depicted, in The Last Generation of the Guan Family (1926), the collapse of both a character and his house. In the post-war period, scholars identified traces of Usher in Casa tomada by Julio Cortázar (1951), in Le roi Cophetua by Julien Gracq (1970), and in Stephen King’s The Shining (1977). The evidence list of the multifarious influences of Poe’s tale extends into the present day and is likely to continue further, evermore.

We have yet to mention a slew of novellas and novels, many belonging to “genre literature,” which have taken up and extended the tale of the House of Usher. Given the eroticism, mystery, and fantasy permeating Poe’s narrative, it is hardly surprising that its descendants belong to various textual classes: science fiction in Ray Bradbury’s Usher II (1950) and La maison Usher ne chutera pas [Usher’s House Will not Fall] by Pierre Stolze (1999); horror fantasy in The Man Who Collected Poe by Robert Bloch (1951), Usher’s Passing by Robert R. McCammon (1984) and Le tumulte de mon sang [My Blood’s Tumult] by Stanley Péan (1991); the detective novel in Madeline: After the Fall of Usher by Marie Kiraly (1996) and in Return to the House of Usher by Robert Poe (1997); as well as erotic fiction in various declensions, including both gothic and pornographic tale in The Darker Passions: The Fall of the House of Usher by Amarantha Knight (1995), erotic romance in Clandestine Classics: The Fall of the House of Usher by Morticia Knight (2013), and queer reimagining in The House of the Resonate Heart by L. A. Fields (2013).

Adaptations of Poe’s short story make for a rich menagerie. The first musical adaptation of Usher would be attributed to Claude Debussy had he been able to complete his planned opera. The distinction of the first complete musical adaptation goes instead to Edward Burlingame and his symphonic poem (1920), which was soon followed by a string quartet composition by Jurgis Karnavičius (1928), and a symphonic poem by Robert Braine (1930). In 1965, Australians Gwen Harwood and Larry Sitsky composed a one-act opera, and, in 1984, Russian composer Nikita Koshkin penned the classical guitar piece Usher Waltz. Two more recent operas adapted The Fall of the House of Usher, one by Philip Glass (1988), the other by Gordon Getty (2014). Experimental rock music has also riffed on Poe’s tale: Peter Hammill wrote and performed his rock opera Usher (1991) and followed it in 1999 with The Fall of the House of Usher (Deconstructed & Rebuilt). Among other examples is the track “The House of Usher” on the album Shadow of the Raven by gothic instrumentalists Nox Arcana (2007). On the theatre stage, adaptations have featured a production at the Grand-Guignol in Paris by Henri-René Lenormand in 1918 and a dance theatre piece in seven scenes by Frederic Lansing Day (1926), through adaptations performed at Avignon in 1964, London in 1975, Vancouver in 1994, and Paris in 2011.

It is cinema, however, that has produced the great majority of the story’s adaptations. As early as 1927 a silent short film, produced by James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber, experimented with expressionist aesthetics in visualizing the story. The following year, Jean Epstein, assisted by Luis Buñuel, directed what would become a standard of the story’s cinematic adaptations. A succession of adaptations appeared in later years, beginning with Ivan Barnett’s (1950), followed by Roger Corman’s starring Vincent Price (1960), and Jesús Franco’s outlandish Revenge in the House of Usher (1982), as well as others directed by Alan Birkinshaw (1989), Roger Leatherwood (2004), and Hayley Cloake (2006), rounded out by David DeCoteau’s softcore gay erotica treatment (2008). Special mention must be made of two short films by Curtis Harrington, produced nearly sixty years apart: the first, silent and monochrome, in 1942; the second, in full sound and color, in 2000. Notably, the director played the roles of both Roderick and Madeline Usher—in both films. And, as recently as 2023, an eight-part limited series created by Mike Flanagan, had a successful run on the Netflix streaming platform.

The body of graphic art adaptations is just as vast: bandes dessinées, comic books, illustrated children’s books, and a multifarious plethora of other pictorial works inspired by The Fall of the House of Usher. In 1948, Will Eisner used it as the backdrop for an issue of the comic book The Spirit, and later recastings in graphic formats included Tom Sutton’s Eerie (1969), Al Hewetson and Maro Nava’s Scream (1973), Martin Salvador’s Creepy (1975), and Richard Corben’s A Corben Special: House of Usher (1984). More recently, an illustrated treatment was self-published by French graphic artist Alain Michaud (2013). Young audiences have also received their fair share of adaptations and rewritings in various tones: as gothic in Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Madness (2004) for ages 7–12 and in “Edgar Allan Poe Graphic Novels Series” (2013) for 10–14-year-olds, and as comedy in Graphic Classics: Edgar Allan Poe (2006) for children aged 9–12. Yet other examples include a bande dessinée adaptation by Nicolas Guillaume (2007) and a graphic novel for ages 10–14 by Matthew K. Manning and Jim Jimenez (2013). At least two video game adaptations complete the repertory: an early iteration for the Commodore 64 console (1984) and a more recent treatment in which the player accompanies another of Poe’s famous characters, Detective Dupin, to the House of Usher (2014).

In sum, The Fall of the House of Usher has enjoyed one and a half century of sustained attention from not only audiences and critics, but, importantly, scores of creators, be they writers, filmmakers, musicians, and graphic artists. In the present age of proliferating fan fiction and DIY literature, Poe’s classic, which straddles a variety of literary genres and which finds appreciative audiences both in the most distinguished and the least legitimated zones of the literary realom, has spawned a copious progeny.

Erudite selections

It has been a commonplace since Roman antiquity: there are too many books. The overabundance of publications and, therefore, of possible readings makes any exhaustive knowledge impossible and hampers the discovery of great works. The myth of the ideal library is but an attempt at compensation. In lieu of total knowledge, one must choose to know the best books and the best authors. The ideal library is composed of only essential books, those that possess the greatest value and convey the most cardinal moral virtues. It exists solely as an ideal, whether on the page or in the mind, but anyone can strive towards its completion by acquiring and reading literary works. As says Father Faria in Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte-Cristo (1844): “I found out that with one hundred and fifty well-chosen books a man possesses, if not a complete summary of all human knowledge, at least all that a man need really know.” Edmond Dantès’ fellow prisoner serves as his personified library through which to acquire essential knowledge. The compensatory myth of the ideal library requires mediation in order to function fully. Collections of classics and lists of masterpieces collated by literati represent selections meant for the general reader, who delegates to the literati the responsibility of expressing preferences whose validity is guaranteed by the authority with which they are invested. Every proposition of a literary canon is put forward both as a means accessible to all through which to draw closer to the ideal library and as the product of the singular authority of select individuals. The mediation of “literary memory” bridges the distance between the classics and contemporary literature, between “collective genealogies” and singular experience (Schlanger 2008 [1992]). As readers “who have sedimented this library throughout their lives and who consider past authors to be diversely aged interlocutors whom they can, at will, by picking up a book, detach from or get close to” (Macé 2013, 9), literati, in cooperation with publishers and other mediators, can actualize potential canons and contribute to the emergence of entirely new canons.

There is no shortage of literary means through which to erect personal pantheons. Epigraphs, prefaces, manifestos, and other literary arts provide writers and literary movements with opportunities to “clean up the existing pantheon, order the cabinet of idols differently” (Diaz 2007, p. 418). This may take the form of the “desert island game,” in which writers are asked to express their paramount preferences, or surveys, such as one that asked French authors to express their opinion “for or against Beaudelaire” in 1957 (Labbé 2022). More recent reflections would probably ask why we might reread Machiavelli or Voltairine de Cleyre. Sometimes, authors share the contents of their home libraries with the public. In Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus [Unpacking my Library] (1931), Walter Benjamin cites only a few authors by name. Rather than name-dropping classics, Benjamin instead reflects on the act of collecting and on the collection accumulated by a wandering book lover throughout the years. Homi Bhabha (1995), in a text he composed while a new professor at the University of Chicago, took up a similar endeavor in asking what sort of history of one’s self and time is coded in one’s book collection?

Publishers frequently produce editions of classics in which the mediating role of literati is predominant. The notoriety of the mediator and the synthesizing nature of such endeavors can make for bestsellers, as was the case with Georges Pompidou’s Anthologie de la poésie française [Anthology of French Poetry] (1961). As with literary histories and textbooks, anthologies present a specific reading of collective history: “the compilation of an anthology hinges on a foregoing work of selecting, pruning, and ordering of chosen texts and authors, and its configuration reveals the implicit narrativization of a whole—whether rooted in geography, gender, identity or other unifying characteristic—of which the volume aims to be the synecdoche” (Cellard 2010, 44). Every writing of a community’s history implies a number of elevations and many more relegations. Demonstrating that debates on canon composition have lost none of their vitality, both the French literature textbook series Lagarde et Michard (1948-1962) and The Norton Anthology of English Literature (1962) have retained notoriety as much for constituting the basic reading curricula of countless students as they have, more recently, for having been rather too discriminating in their selections, notably in relation to gender and ethnicity (Kelly 2000).

As well, some writers have composed anthology volumes of their favorite readings, such as Pierre Bergounioux’s Bréviaire de littérature à l’usage des vivants [Handbook of Literature for Use by the Living] (2004) and Frédéric Beigbeder’s Bibliothèque de survie [Survival Library] (2021). Others have published their advice on the compilation of a robust personal library, from Bibliothèque choisie [Selected Library] by Paul Colomiès (1699) to 201 livres qu’il faut avoir lus pour ne pas mourir idiot [201 Books to Have Read So As Not to Die an Idiot] by Marc Lemonier (2009), through L’art de former une bibliothèque [The Art of Making a Library] by Émile Henriot (1928), to the bibliographical compilations published by Pierre Wigny under the collective title La bibliothèque de l’honnête homme [The Honest Man’s Library] (1945-1968). Other people of letters have published their thoughts on suggested books for the general reader, including Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book (1940) and Harold Bloom’s How To Read and Why (2000).

The scope of the task—that is, the potential infinity of the body of works to compile—encourages the production of collective volumes. In France, two such publications have made a lasting mark. One was the result of a survey of authors, under the direction of Raymond Queneau, published under the title Pour une bibliothèque idéale [Toward an Ideal Library] (1956), the other is La bibliothèque idéale [The Ideal Library] (1988) coordinated by Pierre Boncenne and prefaced by Bernard Pivot. The two projects were conducted along different lines (Renaud 2014). Queneau surveyed two hundred writers, asking each to list one hundred works that would constitute their ideal library. Boncenne, for his part, directed specialist groups in identifying a selection of forty nine works in each domain of the humanities, leaving a fiftieth position in each to be filled in by the reader. The works were classified hierarchically: for each domain, ten titles were selected as most valuable, that selection being further broadened to twenty-five secondary titles, the remainder being considered of tertiary importance. In Queneau’s ideal literary library, the Bible, Shakespeare, Proust, Montaigne, Rabelais, and Baudelaire occupy the topmost positions, while Pierre Boncenne’s selection includes 20th-century classics, such as Camus and Céline, but also includes more surprising entries in the form of mystery novels and cookbooks. Ultimately, those who cannot read everything, but wish they could, must rely on the erudite selections of the literati to guide them through the multitude of accessible texts.

Series

Among the great many publications of classics, editorial series marketed as “heritage” collections occupy a dominant position. Since the 19th century, publishers have sought to give each collection a certain brand image by choosing specific colors, a layout, a design, etc., as well as an ideological orientation (Olivero 2022). The formal and commercial apparatus of a collection makes it more easily discernible for readers, since they can follow its distinguishing marks from one volume to the next thanks to a certain conceptual unity. Form and substance together imbue collections with identity (Spiers 2011)

Among such heritage series, notable entries include illustrated paperback monograph collections, exemplified by Poètes d’aujourd’hui [Poets of Today] published by Seghers beginning in 1944 (Labbé and Martens 2015), various scholastic collections, as well as monograph collections adopting “work of a lifetime” formats, such as Les Grands Écrivains français [The Great French Writers] (Hachette, 1887), which gave pride of place to Madame de Sévigné, Victor Cousin, Montesquieu, and George Sand (Jipa 2016). For the purposes of our discussion, we will concentrate on affordable collections of literary classics, beginning with an international overview of their history (Glinoer 2021). Such collections proliferated in the early 19th century. In France, in 1799, François-Ambroise Didot launched his Collection des classiques français [Collection of French Classics], published in three different paper qualities, each sold at different prices. In 1817, Milanese publisher Giovanni Silvestri entrusted Pietro Giordani to direct his Biblioteca scelta di opere italiane antiche e moderne [Selected library of ancient and modern Italian works]. In Germany, Miniatur-Bibliothek der Deutschen Classiker [The Miniature Library of German Classics] was published in 1826 under the auspices of Bibliographisches Institut. In England, various similar collections appeared during the 1830s (Altick 1958), notably the Aldine Edition of the British Poets followed by Chandos Classics, published by Thomas Nelson, and Macmillan’s Globe Library. In France, the book publisher Gervais Charpentier launched a series of publications in 1838, entitled Bibliothèque Charpentier, which he envisioned as representing a literary and philosophical pantheon, available at an affordable and in a portable format (Olivero 2022). He rapidly encountered competition from publishers such as Hetzel and Hachette, who also launched low-cost collections bringing together contemporary works and public domain classics. While some collections focused on national anthologies (Cassel’s National Library, Dentu’s Nos grands auteurs, and Talbot Press’ Every Irishman’s Library), others were more universal in scope (Classiques Larousse, Griffin’s Universal Library); while some brought together works based on various origins (Bettoni’s Biblioteca portatile latina, italiana e francese [Latin, Italian and French Portable Library]), others divided their collections into national or linguistic subsets.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the entry into the public domain of the preceding century’s romantic and Victorian works, as well as increasingly widespread education and the predominant place of classic works in school curricula, fuelled a proliferation of affordably-priced classics collections.

Everyman’s Library

The Everyman’s Library collection was the fruit of the encounter between publisher Joseph Dent and writer Ernest Rhys, the former hiring the latter as editor general of the collection. Anticipating that under the United Kingdom's Copyright Act of 1842 a majority of Victorian authors' works would enter the public domain at the turn of the century, the two men devised the architecture of what would become the Everyman’s Library. Between 1906 and 1956, one thousand volumes were published in the series, covering various domains of knowledge and world literature, organized in twelve categories that included: fiction, history, science, travel, children’s literature, philosophy, poetry, and… the classics. The collection was designed to be treasured: the production was elegant, the paper and binding of sound quality, the volumes identical in format and similar in thickness. The books were prefaced by specialists and notable writers who were remunerated for their contributions. The collection’s success was sustained: an annual average of 10,000 copies, for a total of over 60 million, of the series’ 1239 volumes were sold through 1975 (Turner 1992).

Two formats dominated this field. One was the small booklet, typically stapled and printed on thin paper; among them were Classiques pour tous [Classics for All] by Hatier, Temple Classics by Dent, and Little Blue Books by Haldeman-Julius. The other was the bound book, elegantly produced and designed to be collected, yet still priced affordably; these included Everyman’s Library and, in the the United States, the Little Leather Library launched by brothers Albert and Charles Boni in 1915. Other publishers, such as Nelson, in Scotland, specialized in collections of reprints, including the New Century Library and Nelson’s Sixpenny Classics.

The immediate post-war years saw the emergence of new collections, including Penguin Classics (1946), the Club français du livre’s Classiques (1947), Rizzoli’s Biblioteca Universale (1949) and Adler’s Great Books of the Western World (1952). During the 1950s in France, the growing popularity of paperback books also occasioned the republication of many classics, notably in the Livre de poche classique [Paperback Classics] (1958) series. Other series were more closely defined by ideological concerns, such as Les Classiques du Peuple, founded by Communist intellectuals and published by Éditions sociales between 1950 and 1981, covering seventy titles and including works by Thomas More, Molière, Helvétius, Goethe, and Paul Lafargue.

La Pléiade

The Pléiade collection was launched by publisher Jacques Schiffrin in 1931 and continued by Éditions Gallimard, in a spirit of democratization of access to the best editions of the best authors. Since then, inclusion in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade has become one of principal marks of literary legitimacy in France. Its success has been due in part to its material presentation: a “luxury paperback” printed on Bible paper and bound between soft leather covers. The format made the collection the portable masterpiece library of choice for any self-respecting French literato. The aura surrounding La Pléiade is such that it has served as a model for classics collections elsewhere, including for the Library of America series.

In order to engage readers’ loyalty and encourage further purchases, Éditions Gallimard launched the parallel collection Albums de la Pléiade, included as a gift with the purchase of three volumes from the Bibliothèque during what is known as the Quinzaine de la Pléiade [Pléiade Fortnight], every May. Most of the Albums provide accounts of the lives of writers, complemented by abundant iconography. Published as one-off annual editions on glossy paper, Albums de la Pléiade have become collector’s items while enhancing the heritage-making impact of the main collection (Scibiorska 2015).

During the 1990s, another wave of collection publications arose in France and in Belgium, exemplified by the success of Maxi-Livres’ Classiques français and Classiques étrangers series. In the English-speaking world, several older collections were republished in new editions, including Great Books of the Western World, Everyman’s Library, and the Modern Library. In addition, it is difficult to overstate the importance of the digitization of literature, beginning with classics, which took its first steps with Project Gutenberg in 1971 and subsequently evolved further through initiatives such as Wikisource. In the physical realm, affordable paperback and digest editions of classics have remained a cornerstone of bookstore and library shelves.

The various selections and collections of classics are indicative of a middlebrow cultural positioning in which the notions of heritage literature and the bestseller intertwine to produce better than average sales figures for books representing “the great works” in refined yet accessible editions. As with encyclopedias and dictionaries, publishers’ objectives amalgamate profit and heritage-making. And all these productions of classics become the repositories and preservation institutions of ostensibly common knowledge, which they also contribute to construct. To speak with authority about the classics, to write alongside the classics, perhaps to continue the work of the classics and to do so with an extensive audience represents a singular opportunity of legitimation for any literato. Through proximity with classic literary works, one can communicate with entire communities, but this potential creates competition around the organization and publication of the great works of the past. In Argentina, for example, in 1915, two low-cost collections of national literature were published in Buenos Aires: La Biblioteca Argentina, published by Ricardo Rojas, and La Cultura Argentina, compiled by José Ingenieros. Rojas, in an effort to counter his competitor’s alleged leftist nationalism, wrote to the press in order to affirm that he alone had been the first to conceive of, if not the first to publish, such a collection. Rojas went on to denounce La Cultura Argentina’s editorial selections, implicitly denying its right to adequately represent Argentina’s national culture (Degiovanni 2004). As with the later canon wars, these wranglings make clear that the teaching, reading, and commercialization of classics are subject to ideological, political, commemorative, and other claims. The necessity of reading the classics remains a refrain of conservative discourses, yet it is also present in discourses arguing for cultural democracy, and proponents of popular and proletarian causes have not been strangers to it either. Classics are brandished by both left and right as pillars of civilization. Literary classics, therefore, fulfill social functions. The next chapter will explore how extensively and in what ways they do so.

Chapter 4. The social lige of classics

What is the scale at which a writer or work becomes classic? What are the socio-historical conditions that may explain why Victor Hugo became a classic in Brazil or Jorge Luis Borges in Spain, while vast numbers of other authors never approach that status, either ante- or post-mortem? In the present chapter, we will examine the national, transnational, and sometimes global reach of certain classics, both in the past and today, seeking answers to the question: What is the extent of a classic?

National literatures

The nation state is the dominant frame of reference for Western societies—or at least was so from the French Revolution to the Second World War, as this standard of identity prevailed above all others throughout the time of Europe’s colonial expansion. During this era, language, literature, and culture in general played a key role in the construction of national identities. “The national imagination” rested partly on literary heritage: it was through literature and the printed word, among other media, that national cultural identity was defined (Anderson 1983). In the words of Anne-Marie Thiesse (2019, 12-14): “literature, as do music and painting, participates in the advent and stability of nations by creating transmitted, learned, and constantly renewed representations.” Writers are invested of a “dual function in representing the nation”: while their work provides the nation with “its self-awareness,” writers themselves become the “incarnation of the national spirit” and the “quintessence of the nation”. When state power no longer relied on divine legitimation, it required alternate means of validation, among which was the veneration of “great men”: great men of state, great artists, great scholars, and, not least among them, great writers.

The classics of state

Many nation states have maintained vigorous policies to encourage the reading and celebration of classics. In Russia, literary classics—классика or klassika—have since the late 19th century been the object of not only respect but veneration as exemplars of heritage (Géry 2017). The names most commonly encountered in this domain are known far beyond Russia’s borders: Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov. Among the Russian writers, Aleksandr Pushkin has been the object of the most sustained and durable cult of personality. Indeed, in 2011, then-President Dmitry Medvedev decreed that June 6th, Pushkin's birthday, would henceforth be celebrated as Russian Language Day.

The exaltation of the national past was certainly a focal preoccupation of the French Third Republic (1870-1940). The cult of great men (writers, artists, politicians, scholars) became a substitute doctrine for the Catholic monarchism which had for centuries served as the central pillar of national identity (Vaillant 2010). National literary history was given pride of place, particularly in education. And literary education was informed by political and, specifically, patriotic concerns (Aron and Viala 2005). The composition of a list of authors and works constituting the accepted canon defined an explicitly French national literature that was distinct from those of other nations. This canon of foundational texts and authors, thus constructed, contributed to confer new authenticity and legitimacy to the national literature. During the 19th century in France, two important developments attended this process: first, the entry of French classics into the canon alongside the Greek and Roman standards; and, second, among those French classics, the emergence of contemporary works and writers joining those of the siècle classique. For example, in 1802, the Commission des livres classiques [Classic Books Commission] published a report that included a “chronological list of Works for higher and secondary education,” which included a number of French authors in addition to the classics of antiquity (Milo 1984). The content of professorial examinations (agrégation) from the period, both for higher education and secondary school teaching, also provides useful indicators of the progressive incursion of French authors into curricula (Jey 2014). The agrégation in literature, the certification with the highest standing, centered on the hard core of the French canon: Racine, Corneille, Molière, Boileau, Bossuet, La Fontaine, and Voltaire. The 17th century remained prevalent in the 19th. Through the period 1880–1900, while French medieval, 16th-century, and 19th-century literature gained in prominence, the 17th century still accounted for more than half of all references in agrégation examinations and the same “institutional pantheon” prevailed in Bachelor’s degree examinations (Jey 2020).

Elsewhere, authoritarian governments have attempted to condition what their populations read and to impose strictly defined lists of great writers to be admired unquestioningly. In Italy, language and literary tradition had long occupied a strategic position in the construction of national identity. Thus, Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime (1922–1943) did not invent, but wholeheartedly adopted, the propensity to selectively reread the past in ways that exalted Italian virtues while aggrandizing individuals and events that best served its legitimization. Italian fascism accentuated claims to ancient precursors (Dante, Machiavelli) and contemporary champions (Marinetti, D’Annunzio) and these claims were given most prominent expression in public spectacle and commemorations of ancient Roman and modern Italian great men, which became a staple of education and public life throughout the regime’s duration (Del Vento and Tabet 2009).

Aside from these specific examples, dominant literary canons may have vastly different ideological and structural underpinnings. Authoritarian policies can be supernational (USSR), while many democracies (e.g. Belgium, Switzerland, Canada) are not predicated on strictly unified visions of territory, language, state, or culture. Nevertheless, nation states principally act within three domains to promote the reading of classics and thereby to strengthen the national imagination: the education of youth in schools, the democratization of culture, and heritage-making.

The classics at school

To speak of literary classics is necessarily also to speak of education. Canons are transmitted by way of official curricula, tests, competitive examinations, textbooks, and literary histories. This is true everywhere, but is especially so in France, where the education system is highly centralized and where the literary and philosophical canons constitute major components of schooling. Importantly, however, as Pierre Bourdieu has shown, rather than equalize opportunities, schools tend to reinforce class differences. They do this partly by directing students’ aspirations towards more or less highly valued positions according to socio-economic characteristics, and partly by imposing study curricula conveying that which is considered legitimate culture—tendentiously that of the dominant strata of society. In terms of reading, school has played an especially key role in the development of a “classical culture”: exploiting the link between language learning and literary education, school provides students with the tools to proceed from general to scholarly readings, while imposing an obligatory canon to be read. But, wrote Bourdieu (2014 [2012], 98), “[l]egitimate culture is the culture guaranteed by the state, guaranteed by this institution that guarantees the qualifications of culture, that delivers diplomas that guarantee a possession of a guaranteed culture. The school syllabus is a concern of the state”.

In the collective imagination, school is meant to mediate the reading of the most valuable books. The scholastic teaching of literature is often designed to ensure that students recognize the value of the works being taught. The youngest readers, considered vulnerable and in need of protection, are inculcated with cultural hierarchies of works, authors, and classes of texts. Teachers of literature, themselves literati, are responsible for the transmission of the literary canon. Having successfully passed the formative trials of higher education, their perspectives, methods, research objectives, and teaching approaches have been validated by schools and universities. Caught in a feedback loop that continually reaffirms the validity of the canon, they comment, critique, compare, and interpret literary facts and texts and, in so doing, reinforce those facts and texts as valuable objects of study. Educated youth, lest we forget, represent an important, undoubtedly the most important, part of the readership of literary classics: students read the classics either because the curriculum requires it, or because they heed the mediators (teachers, parents, textbooks) who seek to raise who seek to broaden students’ general knowledge.

The Great Books of the Western World

Education curricula predicated on the reading of “the great works of the Western tradition” emerged at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, on the initiative of university president Robert Maynard Hutchins, and noted philosopher and educator Mortimer Adler. In subsequent decades, these programs formed the spearhead of a widely adopted approach to teaching through the classics. In 1940, Adler published a book whose success was as immediate as it was widespread: How to Read a Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education. In it, Adler argued that reading the great works would make one not only a better reader, but also a better citizen. In this view, a single culture transcended social class and ethnic origins. As a liberal humanist, Adler sought to broaden access to knowledge on the foundations of civilization and, especially, civil rights. Education was key, whether it was received at school or practised at home through reading. In Adler’s view, the great (principally European and American) narratives, selected by literati and transmitted by educators, would form the foundations of democratic culture. How should the right texts be selected? The “great works” by “great authors” are those that have been most read through the centuries because they remain always actual. They are instantly intelligible for the general reader and their meanings are multi-layered. Ultimately, the great books are those that “have made the basic contributions to human learning and thought” and which apply “the leading principles of human knowledge” to “the persistently unsolved problems of human life” (Adler 1940, 335).

Under Hutchins’ directorship, the University of Chicago piloted tuition-free “great books classes” and centered undergraduate curricula on the reading of those great books and on Socratic dialogics. In order to fund his great books approach, Hutchins cancelled the school’s football program and attempted to abolish fraternities—initiatives which won him as many enemies as friends. More broadly, during the 1960s, reading groups inspired by Adler’s principles proliferated throughout the US, totalling tens of thousands of participants.

Moreover, Adler and Hutchins developed the Great Books of the Western World publication series, as well as the accompanying Syntopicon, an index of 102 “great ideas” appearing throughout the Great Books designed to guide readers in navigating the series. The series was published in 54 daunting volumes, which nevertheless sold quite well. Published and sold by Encyclopædia Britannica, which had a well-established sales model, the series sold 40,000 copies in 1960, and appeared in translation in German, Italian, and French. The Great Books of the Western World remained a highly successful franchise until the mid-1970s (Lacy 2013).

When the transmission of cultural values is perceived to have failed in its endeavor, discourses deploring youth’s estrangement from the classics often point to school as the culprit. In La perte et l’héritage [Loss and Heritage], Raphaël Arteau McNeil portrays school as the space in which the stoppage of transmission has been the most sudden, complete, and violent. Arteau McNeil compares education to the sowing of common sense: heritage is received and in turn bestowed again on subsequent generations. Literary heritage is in peril, he argues, and education through general culture is the best means of preventing its disappearance. The great works, in this view, represent a body of work born of tradition which must be received as is. It is the legacy of past generations which must be appropriated so that it may be transmitted to future generations (Arteau McNeil 2018).

But does the teaching of classics truly play an indispensable role in the development and preservation of reading practices? Nothing appears less certain when one asks those chiefly concerned. In a survey conducted among French secondary school students, Madame Bovary and Le Cid made top of the list of readings that students detested most. Indeed, some respondents qualified those readings as “traumatic” (Guittet 2021) and it is difficult to forget former president Nicolas Sarkozy’s recollections of having “suffered much” through his reading of La princesse de Clèves. A survey asking French high school students about their reading of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary found that they generally considered the work disappointing. For students, to read a classic is indeed to read a timeless text, but it is also to read, by obligation, something dated and potentially tedious. Although the pleasure of reading is thus mitigated, students experiences of reading were nevertheless found to be satisfying and lively: what the educational institution transmitted to students was not a taste for reading, and even less an appetite for the canon, but rather a rapport with texts and analytical skills (Marpeau 2022). We would be mistaken, however, to believe that students categorically reject the classics. What they express, rather, is an indifference towards institutional recognition and a marked preference for contemporary works (Brehm 2018). As much as the literati return indefinitely and incessantly to the classics, other readers tend to avoid them when no longer bound by curricular obligations.

Cultural democracy

Cultural democracy constituted one of the objectives of national public policies in the industrialized world during the second half of the 20th century. This notion of the democratization of culture was founded in a “universalizing and relatively elitist vision of culture” (Coulangeon 2021, 225), and thus in a vertical perspective within which public authorities act not to broaden the boundaries of culture, but to improve access to it in its most consecrated forms. In France, in the late 1950s, André Malraux argued for policies to “make accessible to the greatest number the foremost works of humanity and favor the creation of works of art and of intellect that enrich humanity” (quoted in Détrez 2020, 15). The French interventionist welfare state advocated both for the educational value of culture and for France’s role in the dissemination of a universal culture.

This political will gave rise to a range of state-supported cultural programs and institutions, notably with the creation of France’s maisons de la culture [houses of culture]. In the 1950s and 1960s, Jean Vilar’s Théâtre national populaire [National Popular Theatre] exemplified a model of theatre seeking to bring classics to popular audiences. For Vilar, the fundamental issue was for the community to reappropriate a heritage which had been confiscated by socio-cultural elites. In this model, Vilar institutionalized the concept of “culture for all” and aimed to create a universal theatre that could educate through the masterpieces of the past (Denizot 2013). To achieve this, he instituted a number of policies to attract the general public, including earlier starting times at 8 PM, lower prices, free coat checks, preview performances open to the public, and asking spectators to fill out appreciation questionnaires (Fleury 2007).

Heritage-making

Literary classics exist not only in written form. They are part of our everyday experience, whether it is in the names of streets, parks, libraries, subway stations, or on the frontispieces of great writers’ monuments. In France, some have a place in the Paris Panthéon, a mausoleum housing the remains of Voltaire, Rousseau, Dumas, Hugo, Zola, Genevoix and Malraux, among others. Recently, in addition, France has named its “national author”: at the behest of the President of the Republic, a vote was held by the Société des gens de lettres [Society of People of Letters] in which, unsurprisingly, Victor Hugo was declared the victor. Literary classics are part of communities’ heritage. But how does literature become heritage?

The notion of heritage has in the past been more closely associated with such domains as architecture, nature conservation, and technology, but became progressively broadened and has come into regular use in the context of cultural policies and initiatives. André Malraux, who served as France’s first Minister of Culture from 1959, adopted the term amid the creation of the Inventaire général du patrimoine culturel [General Inventory of Cultural Heritage]. And, in more recent decades, the term’s usage has been extended to encompass an ever-greater variety of objects (Louichon 2015), the book included. Two ways of relating to the past are discernible within the notion of heritage: inheritance and preservation. A work having heritage value is one which future generations should inherit as part of a common good underpinning a common culture. Yet this leaves us with the question of how does any individual or social group “inherit” forms of cultural expression (Houdart-Mérot 2012)? And this inheritance is fragile, since it is subject to the attritions of time and must be safeguarded against always impending disintegration.

Literary heritage is borne of selections and elevations. It is the never-finalized product of individual and collective mediations over time. It is also a reflection of the discriminations and inequalities shaping societies over the course of their history. But to what heritage do books of literature belong? By definition grouped with “cultural heritage,” the book’s position within the field of cultural productions is potentially precarious: perceived as an expression of “intangible heritage” and thus protected by UNESCO since 2003, the book thus loses its material dimension. The particularly French notion of patrimoine écrit, or written heritage, on the other hand, reinforces a conservative focus on books by discounting other manifestations of literary creation (Henryot 2020). Literature in this sense is difficult to categorize as a specific type of heritage, because the book-object, industrially reproducible for the past five hundred years, is rarely threatened with extinction and is even less so today, in the age of wholesale digitization of entire literary corpora. There certainly is a flourishing market for first editions and autographed manuscripts, but literary heritage is not concentrated in precious artefacts. The institutions likely to preserve literary heritage are fewer and hold less sway than those dedicated to safeguarding natural resources or architectural objects. Yet, in today’s societies, literature holds a preeminent place among the various domains in which heritage is a prized value. After all, is literature’s raw material not language, the catalyst par excellence for the shaping of collective identities? The dynamics of literary heritage-making are many and their attendant productions are increasingly well studied (Labbé et al 2021): monographs, dictionaries, writers’ homes, literary exhibitions, and monuments to literature all testify to the social value of classics in the public space.

The limits of the national model

Firmly ensconced though it may be in educational systems, as well as in cultural democracy and heritage-making initiatives, the nation-state framework proves too restrictive in the context of literature in that it obscures diverse collective realities. Since nation-states are historically constructed, they cannot be monolithic entities. Insofar as there exists a French literary canon, there also exist Basque, Norman, Picard, and other counterparts, none of which receive nation-wide recognition. But what of the national outlook elsewhere? Assembling an Indian literary canon, for example, is inconceivable, given the country’s 452 languages, of which 22 are recognized in the constitution, not to mention 4,000 dialects: all have produced literature and all participate in Indian culture. Back in Europe, France’s neighbor Belgium has three distinct linguistic communities and its fair share of authors considered “classic” without, however, designating them as especially “Belgian classics” (Dirkx 1993). In the Canadian province of Québec, there certainly are “Québécois classics” since the 1930s (Chartier 2000), but both their tradition and transmission are “incomplete, chaotic, and contradictory” (Melançon 2004, 25). Examples are many, but suffice it to say that traditionally-defined national perspectives are insufficient to describe the multifarious manifestations of literary heritage.

And what of literatures emerging from encounters between colonizers and colonized, invaders and invaded? There is no shortage of cultures very nearly wiped out by colonization, but, where they do survive, countless negotiations take place between the imposed and the native cultures. The former Czechoslovakia, for one, provides an interesting example. The country’s incorporation into the Soviet sphere of influence in 1948 was followed by the imposition of strictly ideological perspectives on the past. For example, what had been a 19th-century romantic nationalist movement, the Czech National Revival, was co-opted by the Soviet-controlled Communist government and national classics, such as the realist Alois Jirásek, were reinterpreted as “precursors of the Revolution” (Lishaugen 2020). Here, as in many other instances, the occupying power intended to change collective memory by rethinking the national discourse in order to legitimate its power, but needed to do so through already prevailing cultural practice.

Even once colonial power has waned, the language and culture it had imposed continue to interact with local traditions. Writers belonging to postcolonial societies, must “import capital,” often by translating or adapting “the great universal texts which are recognized as universal capital in the literary universe” (Casanova 2010 [2002], 297). In Africa, it took until the 1990s, some thirty years after the continent’s seminal independence movements, for “African classics” to be recognized (Ducournau 2017), some of which have since gained classic status throughout the French-speaking world.

In a broader perspective, the problematic dimension of national frameworks for the study of literary classics resides, according to Blaise Wilfert-Portal, in the “implicit, and most often structural, bias in the writing of history, as well as the social sciences and humanities more broadly.” National perspectives continue to define the scope of inquiry for a majority of studies and supranational determinants remain overlooked. This “methodological nationalism” leads researchers to find within their pre-defined corpus the confirmation of its adequacy and completeness, exemplifying “the self-sufficiency of national logics in the interpretation of the nationalization of European societies” (Wilfert-Portal 2013, par. 11). It is essential, therefore, to extend our thinking toward other collective configurations.

Universal classics?

Certain works of literature are known and valued across cultures, nations, and continents. Among our contemporaries, authors such as Elena Ferrante, Haruki Murakami, and Salman Rushdie are among those who can claim worldwide recognition. Moreover, among the classics, some attain yet more enviable global status. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, for example, feature among the readings recommended by China’s Ministry of Education (Hui 2018). In more informal fashion, the website Dante Today is a compendium of “citings and sightings” of a vast array of music, writing, graphic art, as well as gadgets, liquors, desserts, and all manner of consumer goods referencing the author of The Divine Comedy (Benucci 2023). Literary works, books, and reputations travel the world, and publishers develop global strategies for globalized markets. Can we thus speak of some works as world classics?

World literature

The idea of a world literature (Weltliteratur) was posited by Goethe in 1827, in the course conversations transcribed by Johann Peter Eckermann. Goethe’s idea was the fruit of his readings at the time, which included Serbian poetry and a Chinese novel. Goethe was highly interested in non-European literature, and in particular in works by Chinese, Indian, and Persian authors. The concept of Weltliteratur was therefore conceived by a cosmopolitan mind which wished to take into consideration a wide spectrum of literary expression, as well as to instill a healthy mutual emulation among German, British, and French authors. Yet, notwithstanding the idea’s inclusion in The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848) and despite the dream of a proletarian world literature energizing 20th-century communist movements, the yearning for a globalized literature gave way before the advances of nationalism.

In the midst of the canon wars, the concept resurfaced in the field of literary criticism and David Damrosch was the principal artisan of that resurgence. His book, What Is World Literature?, published by Princeton University Press in 2003, has been translated into multiple languages. Damrosch observes at the outset that every literary work is created in a specific language and within a specific cultural tradition and that texts, therefore, circulate first within the limits of their authors’ linguistic and cultural communities. When literature travels between multiple communities, most often in translation, it enters into the realm of world literature. Damrosch views the “globality” of literature as a mode of reading specific to the transmission of literary works beyond their originating contexts. The Epic of Gilgamesh, to cite Damrosch’s (2003) example, originated in Mesopotamia, but has since been time and again translated, interpreted, and adapted for a range of uses, communities, and audiences.

The study of world literature is today a domain of literature studies, alongside comparative literature. Palgrave Macmillan publishes a Canon and World Literature collection, while Harvard University maintains an Institute for World Literature, directed by none other than Damrosch. In the time of the globalized book, when information and content are exchanged in an uninterrupted flow, the category of world literature has opened up the possibility of reading literary works on an unprecedented geographic scale (Longxi 2016). When global perspectives on literature first gained currency, much interest followed, every literato forming their own idea “of what would be the textual corpus of world literature” (David 2005, 115).

As the frisson of world literature made itself felt, so did certain concerns. First, the selection of only the most broadly circulated works (Marx 2020) runs the risk of defining a new canon that is no less debatable than its predecessors, as well as reprising an ahistorical hermeneutics centered on the act of reading of the literato. In Against World Literature, Emily Apter (2013) argues, however, that translation does not necessarily offer a perfectly transparent window onto a unique “world literature”, as Damrosch’s writings may imply. Ultimately, which canon becomes globalized? Does world literature fully acknowledge local cultures in their own right, or does it impose a foreign, Western model? We may legitimately ask whether world literature essentially serves up a European perspective flavored with a dusting of postcolonial exoticism? Is world literature anything other than niche marketing along the lines of world music?

The global literary space

The planetary scale may broaden the scope of canonization, but does not necessarily alter its modus operandi. In response to the dual essentialization of the nation and literature, sociologists of literature, publishing, and translation have envisioned a system of interactions involving nations and other collective entities. Pascale Casanova’s pioneering study, The World Republic of Letters, was a major contribution in this area (2004 [1999]). The title alludes to both the ideal of the Republic of Letters in the modern era and, more or less explicitly, the notion of Weltliteratur as formulated by Goethe. According to Casanova, there has never been a world literature strictly speaking, but, instead, a “global literary space,” which is also an international space of competition.

Pierre Bourdieu defined fields as social spaces of relations marked by competition over resources and capital. Individual fields attain varying levels of autonomy, which evolve over time in accordance with an internal balance of power and as a function of the vitality and frequency of connections among different fields (Bourdieu 1992). Casanova formulates the hypothesis that there exists a homologous relationship between the internal configuration of any national field and the configuration of the international literary space. The World Republic of Letters is governed by a system of unequal exchange leading certain nations to acquire dominant positions within the global literary market due to the political, territorial, diplomatic, religious, and other forms of domination they exercise, or have exercised in the past, over others.

Casanova contends that all literary fields have both national and international poles, building on the observation that in a majority of national literary fields a parallel opposition emerges between distinct spheres: one that is cosmopolitan, rather apolitical, and explicitly literary, the other more intently political, nationalist, and less concerned with literary autonomy. Authors and their works move from the national to the global level by adopting specific literary forms which are recognized on the global scale. Certain authors—because they express themselves in a national language with a long literary history, worldwide recognition, and known for producing world classics—are in a position to combine the symbolic capital acquired within their national field with the cultural capital valued on the global scale. The strength of translation networks testifies to the hierarchization of linguistic groups between those that are hypercentral (English), central (German and French), semi-peripheral (e.g. Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Polish) and peripheral. Global translation networks are characterized by economic, political and cultural dynamics: the more central the language, the greater the number and variety of translations from that language into others and, by the same token, the fewer translations into that language from others (Heilbron 2009).

National literatures participate in the soft power of cultural diplomacy. Thus, the universality of some authors and works within their national literary field may translate into domination over other, less central, regions and cultures within the transnational space of competition between national and other literary communities (Sapiro 2014, 2024). Yet this transnational space is underpinned by cooperation as much as it is by competition and relies heavily on a multiplicity of authorities (Sapiro et al 2018), including the various actors specialized in concluding international accords, prizes such as the Nobel, book fairs, or international institutions like the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Poets, Essayists, Novelists (PEN) Club.

UNESCO Classics

UNESCO was founded in the months following the end of the Second World War. Among the aims outlined in its constitution were “the conservation and protection of the world’s inheritance of books” and giving “the people of all countries access to the printed and published materials produced by any of them.” Thus was instituted the world’s first global policy on books. In the field of literary heritage, programs superintended by UNESCO undertake such endeavors as the inventory of ancient documents and manuscripts, the collection of oral traditions, and the organization of various expositions, among others. In order to promote the notion of a universal heritage of books, UNESCO’s Arts and Letters Division maintained a flagship translation project aiming to constitute a Collection of Representative Works of the world’s literatures. Active from 1948 into the early 2000s, its catalog included some 1,300 works from over 90 languages. Another UNESCO program aimed at the “commemoration of great men,” celebrating intellectuals, artists, writers, and scientists from around the world, including Goethe, Pushkin, Poe, Balzac, Confucius and Chekhov (Giton 2016). Through such initiatives, UNESCO played a notable role in the development of an international cultural space, nevertheless maintaining national identity as a key criterion of inclusion.

A transnational, rather than global, conceptualization of a literary space that oversteps national borders allows for the acknowledgment of the role of cultural carriers, the appreciation of the hybridization processes that result from population movements (Bhabha 1994), and the opening up of categories of appreciation in relation to literary classics. In order to avoid the pitfalls of both methodological nationalism and the ethnocentrically Western trappings of world literature, we must throw open the doors of reflection to other collective identities and recognize canonization processes occurring on infranational scales (local populations, regional identities, non-official languages) and within political, religious, ethnic, and other communities. The global literary space brings together not only nations and linguistic groups. Its development depends largely on the circulation of people, on the existence of privileged mediators between literatures, on institutional exchanges within linguistic groups, and on transnational initiatives. No matter the scale we may choose to consider, any discussion of the canon of literary classics is intrinsically also a debate on the societies and cultures which produce the dominant narratives of history, of value, and of the social imaginary.

Chapter 5. Literary classics today

Before concluding this book, it seems to me necessary to take stock of the present state of the imaginary of the classics and the mechanisms of canonization. Since we cannot avail ourselves of immediate hindsight, in this final chapter I will cautiously ascertain recent developments pertaining to the questions we have considered thus far.

The difficult measure of literary prestige

To begin with, do we even know to what extent authors and works long considered classics are still seen as such by today’s readers? The selection of literary classics is generally entrusted to a mediating authority, such as an individual or group (e.g. scholars, writers, critics) commissioned to elaborate a list of canonical works. Inevitably, the subjectivity, social position, personal experience, and habitus of each literato will tend to determine their choices. It has long been difficult to quantify collective preferences, even at the scale of the nation state. Today, however, computational resources allow for much more accurate assessments of diverse indicators which tell us what circulates, what is appreciated, and what is critiqued. We will now consider several examples of such assessments.

The question of the literary canon has been explored by researchers affiliated with the Stanford Literary Lab (SLL). Among their various studies, one correlated a popularity indicator, based on the number of reprints and translations, with a prestige indicator, based on inclusion in the Modern Language Association International Bibliography (MLAIB). Another study of literary rankings originating from the SLL employs a cartesian graph in which the horizontal axis plots ratings on the Goodreads website, while the vertical axis indicates the number of citations in the MLAIB (Moretti 2017), resulting in the highest rankings for Shakespeare, Dickens, Kafka, Jane Austen, and Hemingway.

Other studies have attempted to measure authors’ prestige as a function of their literary careers. For example, in 2003, Marc Verboord sought to establish a metric of literary prestige derived from such indicators as authors’ membership in institutions (journals, literary magazines, universities), recognition through literary prizes, inclusion in literary encyclopedias, and mentions in reviews and scholarly treatments; in this approach, the winners’ podium of international literary prestige was occupied by Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass, and Toni Morrison. In terms of methods, the ability to assess a growing number of variables allows for a better grasp of the multidimensional nature of literary prestige, although it remains difficult to assign suitable weight to each indicator (Verboord 2003). Sébastien Dubois, for his part, has employed a combined methodology in order to study contemporary French poets as a population. In addition to using indicators of reputation and prestige (e.g. data on paperback republications and dissertation subjects, among others), Dubois (2009) also conducted qualitative interviews with a sample of the population under study and distributed a survey questionnaire.

In recent years, the mass of data and metadata available to researchers has grown at an unprecedented pace and visualization methods have become increasingly refined (Gefen and Crozet 2023). One group of researchers has conducted a study of the enormous databases of the participative multilingual online encyclopedia, Wikipedia: by combining the length of entries with the number of hyperlinks linking to entries from elsewhere, the entries’ ranking by Google’s PageRank algorithm, and individual page views, the authors were able to ascertain the best known and most recognized writers in variety of languages. To no great surprise, Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot were most popular in English, Goethe in German, and Hugo in French (Hube et al 2017).

A study analyzing the highly popular Goodreads website, along with its 120 million users, has observed how amateur critics express appreciation. Aside from the ratings (1 to 5 stars) and reviews, users are also invited to place books on virtual “genre shelves.” The categories used to organize books on these virtual shelves testify to an enormous collective taxonomy incorporating not only conventional literary genres, but also hybrid classifications, hashtags, and publishing industry metadata, among others. The “classics” shelf is only one among thousands, but it is one of the most frequently accessed and one of the most promoted by the website (Walsh and Antoniak 2021). Each data set, calculation method, and graphical representation has its limitations, inherent biases, and undoubtedly also an expiry date, but quantitative approaches are essential for a fuller understanding of the literary canon in all its diverse expressions.

From cultural to multicultural capital

In Distinction (1984a [1979]), Pierre Bourdieu posited a homologous relationship between the spaces of production and reception of cultural productions. Bourdieu demonstrated correspondences between cultural and social hierarchies: the habitus of individuals belonging to the working classes leads them towards so-called popular culture, while the upper classes tend to circumscribe their cultural repertoire to so-called high culture. Without having lost its vitality in some contexts (Détrez 2020), the Distinction model was nevertheless a product of its time and place (i.e. France in the 1960s and 1970s) and cannot be universally applied.

Where have the principal transformations of the last half-century taken place? First and foremost, it is within the homologous relationship described by Bourdieu. To continue with the French example, contemporary society may be no more egalitarian than in the past, yet it is no longer fundamentally characterized by antagonism between social groups as manifested “through the coherent and unified expression of contradictory lifestyles, interests, representations, and aspirations” (Coulangeon 2021, 9). In the first place, this is due to the role of scholastic institutions, which have become a common experience for a vast majority of the population and for longer spans of time, while at the same time losing their former powers of acculturation. The knowledge of classics and “general culture,” as well as the consumption of the most legitimated cultural works, are no longer the most reliable indicators of belonging to elite society. The social hierarchy of tastes and practices is now predicated more on a diversity of preferences, rather than on conformity with the canon of learned culture. Within today’s social elite, preferences tend towards the consumption of multiple cultures and latest trends rather than towards perceived elitist snobbism. Openness to diversity and to productions in languages other than one's own, diminished consumption of scholarly culture and academic writing, increased appetite for travel, and the globalization of exchanges form the bases of the “eclectic legitimacy” (Détrez 2020) favored by dominant classes today. Cultural capital has been supplanted by “multicultural capital” (Coulangeon 2021).

Legitimation processes have become more complex. No longer is there a monolithic, permanent hegemony in the cultural domain. Instead, mutable historical configurations produce a plurality of cultural hierarchizations (Glévarec 2013). Cultural productions which were formerly discredited out of hand (television series, science fiction) have in turn become diversified and hierarchized. The distinction between popular and high literature, which had long structured literary imaginaries, is wearing away. Living authors who can claim the status of transnational classics, such as Michel Houellebecq, Arundhati Roy, and Mario Vargas Llosa, sell a lot of books. While some avowedly best-selling authors may continue to suffer the slings and arrows of critique, the equivalence between great author and poor seller is no longer apt. A handful of multimedia conglomerates dominate the publishing industry. The French literary field, in particular, has moved away from the independent yearnings that had long inspired the denizens of its most prestigious circles. Art for art’s sake seems an outdated notion. The literary, economic, media, and political spheres today interpenetrate one another to previously unequaled degrees.

Literature has undoubtedly been the artistic form best adapted to the political form of the nation state. Writing experienced its greatest influence in the period between the Enlightenment and the end of the second millennium. National literatures have played a central role in the development of national ideals. In recent decades, literature and its foremost exemplars have lost some of their prominence to other forms of cultural expression, while contemporary societies’ globalized, or “glocalized,” cultural dynamics have shifted focus to indigenous, migrant, transnational, and otherwise non-dominant cultures.

The book-object itself, as vessel of the canonized work, has lost its “originating status” with regards to literature and “constitutes only one of the links of the multiplication of media formats. In a sense, it offers a compact, low-tech, retro, family-friendly, and nostalgic version” (Ling and Sol Salas 2022, 207). In this context, attachment to books constitutes “a mark of cultural goodwill serving an ascendant social mobility” or, in other cases, “the affirmation of an inherited cultural capital within a logic of resistance against social relegation” (Barth-Rabot 2023, 96).

Literature has undergone exponential growth in diversity, quantity, and availability. Not only has the digital environment increased the number of productions beyond the book format, but it has also become possible for an individual to undertake the entire sequence of the processes of production and financing of a literary work from their personal computer. A constantly growing mass of works exists outside of the network of physical bookstores and the traditional channels of legitimation, but exists nonetheless.

The corollary of the massification of culture is its segmentation: each individual can advertise their “tags,” preferences, and hit lists. Subscriptions to digital platforms are displacing purchases of individual objects. Digital content providers seek less what will please the greatest number and more what can provide each individual, as a consumer in a hyper-segmented market, exactly what they have come to find. While literary classics are ostensibly valuable for entire communities, today we exist within the personalized algorithmic bubbles of our applications, platforms, and niche interests.

The life of the cultural economy is leaving the world of objects for the realm of content. At the same time there emerges a generalized phenomenon of hybridization between disparate logics (of creation, of consumption, of promotion) in contrast to the great divisions and antagonisms that typified the social imaginations of the 19th and 20th centuries. In literature, as in music and in cuisine, genres and styles cohabit more harmoniously than ever.

In an ocean of content, the challenges of discoverability, of the attention economy, and of cultural accessibility have become central. Literary mediations, too, are undergoing profound transformation. Certain categories of intermediaries that had once been dominant have lost much of their institutional clout. Digital social networks in particular have altered literary criticism, which is no longer practiced exclusively by journalists and scholars, but now also by booksellers, librarians, BookTubers, and BookTokers. While the model of literary communication has not been invalidated, it must certainly be adapted to different modes of publication, such as expositions, performances, fanzines, and social media posts (Bionda et al 2023). Without erasing them outright, the digital realm has made previously impermeable boundaries more porous. This is not to say that intermediaries have disappeared: mechanisms of re-mediation are at work, displacing traditional mediators (Legendre 2019). For example, several French-language YouTube channels (Jeannot se livre, Lemon June, Pikobooks, The Reading Sisters) feature discussions of literary classics. But observation shows that absence of hierarchy among works is the order of the day on a platform that resituates the subject-reader at the center of the reading experience (Marpeau 2021). A classic discussed by BookTubers draws its value less from its social status than it does from the emotions or interest it elicits. Such online praises of the classic are part of a broader democratization and rebalancing (some may cynically say: dumbing down) of what constitutes literary corpora and their uses.

This mediation complex provides readers with a diversity of “selection techniques” and “value indicators” that include expert judgment (literary criticism, prizes, blogs, social media), measures of success, and advice by book professionals. All these are means by which social actors leverage their cultural capital “to reduce the uncertainty inherent in cultural goods.” And the greater an actor’s affluence in cultural capital, the greater their ability to harness a diversity of means to affect readers’ choices (Barth-Rabot 2023, 214).

In short, “the idea of literature” (Gefen 2017) as well as the practices of its creation, mediation, and legitimation are being redefined. The hierarchization of genres, styles, ideas, and other dimensions continues apace, but its forms of mediation and consecration have been transformed. As a result, a greater complexity of mediations and uses, as well as a greater fluidity of the scales of legitimation, characterize the literary space today.

The paradox of the canon

Literary classics, as a privileged class of texts, have not necessarily suffered as a result of these reconfigurations. Beyond the institutional consecration of writers and works, classics continue to sell well in various iterations over long spans of time. In the sea of a constantly increasing mass of cultural productions, the notoriety of literary classics gives them buoyancy: they sail more easily along the surface. Existing, for the most part, in the public domain and valued by public institutions, classics are adapted in myriad ways. There is no shortage of individual appropriations and collective uses, from fanfiction to the merchandising of clothing, puzzles, cups and any number of items sold in any number of stores around the world.

By way of grants, as well as the activities of state cultural institutions and various public policies, public authorities have undoubtedly never done as much as they do today to promote literary classics. One need look no further than the three volumes featuring prominently on the presidential desk (Charles de Gaulle’s Mémoires de guerre, Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, and André Gide’s Les nourritures terrestres) in Emmanuel Macron’s official portrait photograph, which adorns the walls of all city halls in France as of this writing. Perceived to be in decline, the reading of literature has acquired the status of value in and of itself, independent of which work is read. But the promotion of reading is frequently and especially concerned with the reading of a corpus classics. For example, in 2004, Denmark’s Minister of Culture, Brian Mikkelsen, promulgated the idea of compiling a list of books meant to represent the literary canon for all Danish citizens. Specially designated working groups were commissioned to assemble and present a list of twelve works representing the country’s literary heritage. Representative lists were also drawn up for music, cinema, theater, art, architecture, handicrafts, and design. Ultimately, the resulting canon comprised 108 works across nine distinct categories of art forms. In 2023, in a similar vein, the Flemish government presented a Canon van Vlaanderen, a chronological list of events, people, works, and objects meant to be emblematic of Flanders and its history.

Such initiatives signify implicitly that the value of literary classics is no longer unquestionable. The question “What is a classic?” remains relevant, but is today also accompanied, and sometimes replaced by others: “Why (still) read the classics?” and even “What is the point of classics ?”. In the social imagination, literary classics represent works and authors whose reception is undisputed, whose collective appreciation is entirely consensual. But that consensus has fractured. In a certain sense, literary classics have been brought into closer proximity with other literary works because their exceptional status has come into question. As demonstrated by the publication of revised editions of the writings of Mark Twain and Roald Dahl, for example, revised with a view to purging their variously offensive elements, literary classics are no more exempt than other symbolic productions from the ongoing impetus to uproot all expressions of racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination. At the same time, attempts at very real censorship have put some classic works under threat, notably in the United States, where Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye were among the most frequently banned books in 2024. Never has the literary doxa lost so much of its cultural power: the literary past has lost some of its posterity. At the same time, discourses suggesting a “return to the classics” construe them as a key product of heritage and a guarantee of authenticity. “Used in advertising, classics become part of the vogue for what is vintage, for revival: it is the return to a style belonging to generations preceding our own, to the notion of craft” (Cerquiglini 2016, 52).

The model of the great author is also no longer exempt from critical biographical analyses. Great writers are rarely worshipped today and their identification with idealized national aspirations elicits resistance in a time of globalization and the pluralization of identities. The idealized classic writer—male, white, heterosexual, sole author of a difficult and idiosyncratic work—is now viewed opposite the gender, class and race identities of readers.

The literary history of France, even more so than those of other European countries, was built on the contributions of “great men,” which perforce served to obscure the contributions of women. Yet women have written and published for as long as have men, although, until quite recently, the doors of consecration were closed to them. They were ill-treated by critics, ignored by literary prizes, and forgotten by textbooks and examination curricula (Broussin 2018). Rare are those who attained the status of classic, which was perceived through an almost exclusively male prism. Over the past two decades, republications of the works of female authors have multiplied and both educational and literary institutions have accorded them greater recognition.

A rebalancing, and perhaps a swing of the pendulum the opposite direction, is underway in France and elsewhere—let us consider that, since 1903, the Nobel prize in literature has been awarded to seventeen women; but while their share of the prize was 15% during the 20th century, it has risen to 30% since the beginning of the 21st. This movement is made possible by the mediating action of scholars, librarians (Bass 2021), and even bloggers. Women, increasingly given their full due as intellectual and literary classics, receive tributes in the public space, such as that afforded Olympe de Gouges, author of La déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne [The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen] (1791), during the opening ceremonies of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. The publishing world is no exception. Indeed, the movement was already astir in the 1970s, in the United Kingdom, where the Virago Modern Classics collection explicitly aimed to elevate to the status of classic female authors and their works (Withers 2021). It continues today with the publication, in France, for example, of multiple collections showcasing female literary heritage.

Moreover, new modes of collective and interactive writing are emerging within writing workshops, online forums, and reading groups. National spaces are increasingly abandoned in favor of small communities and transnational affiliations, as well as multipolar and multiscalar spaces, to which one can choose to belong in accordance with personal needs and affinities.

The fantasy canon

Fantasy literature illustrates all these evolving issues. As a literary genre, fantasy is relatively recent, although its roots extend to fairy tales and 19th-century frenetic literature. Beyond J. R. R. Tolkien, the fantasy genre is associated with such names as Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Ursula Le Guin and, more recently, J. K. Rowling and George R. R. Martin. However, although literary works play a leading role in the genre’s development, they share the stage with no less important art forms, such as films, television series, comic books, video games, and board games. Since the 1970s, fantasy has developed around editorial collections, emblematic authors, socialization spaces, and reader communities. In the course of its increasing independence relative to other branches of speculative fiction, fantasy has also given birth to offshoots and sub-genres, such as weird fantasy, urban fantasy, and others. Today, in North America, the works of some fantasy authors are increasingly included in university curricula and appended with scholarly apparata. As the existing range of reprints, adaptations, and studies makes clear, fantasy has indeed developed its own canon, and thus undertaken processes of inclusion and exclusion that underpin the legitimation of the genre as such. And who predominates in this canon? Dead white men who wrote in English. In the course of the canon wars, critiques pointed out that fantasy had perpetuated patriarchal, ethnocentric perspectives to the detriment of female, racialized, and LGBTQ voices (Moran 2019). Conversely, a movement fomented by reactionary authors and fans (styling themselves Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies), attacking what they perceived to be political correctness, singled out Black female science-fiction writer N. K. Jemisin in a smear campaign after she had repeatedly been awarded the Hugo and Nebula prizes (Ségas 2022).

In the final analysis, it is the universality of literary classics that is called into question. The very notion of universality in the realm of literature emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries within European national literary spaces alongside notions of vocation, consecration, and nationality. In France, the promotion of universalism was linked with linguistic unification and was methodically imposed. Yet that universalism was built on the marginalization and exclusion of dominated social groups to the benefit of a predominantly nationalist, White, male, and cisgendered concept of what is universal. Thinkers such as Edward Saïd and Gayatri Spivak exposed the Eurocentrism of supposedly universalist perspectives. Similarly, Markus Messling (2023 [2019], 5) draws on historical examples to show “that European universalism was not universal—that it rather sought to universalize its own beliefs, epistemic assumptions, and norms, and that it did so through power and violence”. Other perceptions of what is universal are emerging today. Souleymane Bachir Diagne, notably, has argued that universality must be considered as an attempt at the reciprocal decentering of different people’s identities, rather than the imposition of overarching principles (Bachir Diagne and Amselle 2018).

Without seeking to abolish the idea of canon or contest its validity, can we rethink its foundations? Griselda Pollock likens the composition of a canon to modes of veneration of an artist and, furthermore, to a form of narcissism. All of society, says Pollock, is captive to this mode of thought, including its contestations. To substitute another iteration of the canon for the dominant one offers no escape from this narcissism. Pollock (1999, 16) pleads instead for “an adult rather than an infantile relation to art” that would “disinvest from even a revised, feminised myth of the artist”. Vigorous debates over the content of the canon not only uphold but even strengthen the imagination of the classics. Such is the paradox of the canon: on the one hand, it must be stable, perhaps immutable, if it is to preserve its authority; on the other, it must constantly evolve in order to remain relevant. The consecration market is more open today. Which dead author does not have their society of friends, their dedicated website, their impassioned researcher? The paradox of the canon overarches the renewal of literary classics: revisions of school curricula, inaugurations of new heritage collections, and changes to street names are just some of the signs that the logic of canonization remains central to the various ways we interact with literature.

Conclusion

Literary classics, as this book has endeavored to demonstrate, are the fruit of a combination of time, values, and uses. They are literary works, or authors, whose value over time has garnered the consensus of a community’s entire circuit of literary communication—whether locally, nationally, linguistically or otherwise defined. The phenomenon of canonization involves an interplay of practices and imaginaries influencing one another. The value accorded to literary classics depends on the mediating actions of a range of social actors and is expressed through appropriations, reimaginings, and adaptations. At the heart of the question of literary classics, therefore, resides that of transmission, variously experienced with enthusiasm, anxiety, or resignation.

Let us consider two recent publications to illustrate the foregoing. La fabrique du chef-d’œuvre. Comment naissent les classiques [The Masterpiece Factory: How classics are born] was published in Paris, in 2022. The volume’s editor, Sébastien Le Fol, is also editor-in-chief of the weekly Le Point. The book’s contributing authors were noted intellectuals, researchers, and journalists. The only guidelines for the commissioned chapters were that they should discuss an author, their work, and their reception. The authors featured in the volume were all French, from Rabelais to De Gaulle, by way of all the names one might expect, such as Pascal, Rousseau, Brillat-Savarin, Tocqueville, Hugo, Flaubert, Céline, and Camus. The only woman afforded a place within the compendium was Marguerite Yourcenar and only mainland France was represented. On the other side of the Atlantic, the collective work Canons. Onze déclarations d’amour littéraire [Canons: Eleven Declarations of Literary Love] was published in Montréal, in 2023. The book’s editor Virginie Blanchette-Doucet is a college professor and writer, as were the majority of the book’s contributing authors. Only French-language Québec literature was taken into account. The volume’s focus on literary creation was made explicit already on the cover, which featured the names of eleven authors, each linked by a straight line to a pen, pencil, or other writing implement. Each contributor was asked to entertain a dialogue with a work that had made a lasting impression on them and had fuelled their desire to write. Among the writers whose works were discussed were certain mainstays of Québec literature (Michel Tremblay, Gabrielle Roy, Nelly Arcan), but the works that contributors chose to examine were in large measure not those most often counted among the canon. Indeed the lineup of contributors was itself quite diverse, featuring more men than women and including female and male immigrant writers.

Underneath their apparent similarities, the two publications could not be further apart. As much as La fabrique du chef-d’œuvre is characterized by the singular, it is the plural that predominates in Canons. The first asserts the transcendent value of masterpieces. The second, seeking building blocks that may be added “to the edifice of shared culture” in our era of infinite individual choice, asks: “What is unmissable, essential?”. Since the classic, as self-supporting argument in and of itself, is no longer sufficient to entice youth to read, what canons should we compose (Blanchette-Doucet 2023, 7, 11)? Beyond their differences, both publications testify to a common desire to avail ourselves of literary classics, as well as to bestow them on others. Through reprints and adaptations, controversies and polemics, exclusive and inclusive heritage, rediscoveries and celebrations, forgotten classics and literary geniuses’ manuscripts, it appears that the social process behind the formation of the canon and the making of the literary classics is still very much on going.

Acknowledgments

This book benefited greatly from revisions and comments by Paul Aron, Pascal Brissette, Vincent Laisney, Benoît Melançon, Michel Lacroix, and Stéphane Zékian. I extend my warm thanks to them. I also thank Victoria, my better half, for being present at my side, through the good and the difficult times.

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