Canon:- A Literary Device in Hindi By Pooja Ma'am @englishliteraturetopicspla9894

Have your teachers ever assigned the works of Shakespeare, or maybe some by the Brontë sisters? If so, they probably wanted you to gain experience with what they would call literary canon, which is a collection of works by which others are measured in terms of literary skill and value.

Originally, the Greeks used a kanôn ('straight rod') as a tool in surveying and construction projects to keep things straight and level. Over time, its use as a measuring device was adapted to apply to keeping literary works straight, as well. Through the years, 'canon' has been employed in various ways to classify literature: from assigning works to a particular tradition (i.e. Biblical canon) to attributing them to a specific author (i.e. Shakespearean canon).

The primary usage discussed in this lesson, though, refers to the canon as a yardstick for measuring the value and validity of the world's literature. Many members of the American academic community in the 1980's revolted against this idea of what was then often called the Western canon, which was claimed to be a collection of the world's highest and most influential literature. They felt that there were many other examples of great literature to be found in the world and that the current collection was not as inclusive as it should be. For instance, some of these protestors' central arguments focused on the underrepresentation of women and minorities among the ranks of authors whose works were considered important enough to be part of the literary canon.

Since the 80's, the literary canon has expanded considerably, now including many female authors and people from all walks of life.
Common Writers & Works of the Western Canon

Some of the more influential and widely accepted voices of the western literary canon include:

The Epic of Gilgamesh

The Bible

Homer

Sappho

Sophocles

Plato

Aristotle

Augustine

Beowulf

Dante Alighieri

Chaucer

Francis Petrarch

Miguel de Cervantes

William Shakespeare

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Frederick Douglass

William Wordsworth

Emily Dickinson

James Joyce

Franz Kafka

Virginia Woolf

T.S. Eliot

William Faulkner

Pablo Neruda

Albert Camus

John Steinbeck

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Chinua Achebe

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