ABSTRACT
In the last decades the concept of a canon has figured prominently in theoretical debates about literature. The notion of a canon has been used in this debate as a critical primitive. While there is disagreement about whether or not it is possible to have a canon, whether there is one canon or many canons, and about who should dictate the canon, it has been taken for granted that the notion of a canon is itself a meaningful and fruitful concept in literary studies, and that these questions are meaningful and can be given answers. The idiom of ‘canon’ is relatively new in the theoretical debate. Until the early 1960s there were debates about the nature, content, and value of the literary tradition. Major contribution to the debate around tradition were such works as T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, which proposed a thesis concerning the relationship between tradition and new works that were meant to be a contribution to the tradition, and F.R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition, which purported to define what would today have been called the canon of the English novel. The concept of tradition has not, of course, disappeared from the critical vocabulary, but the concept has ceased to be the focus of an ongoing debate about the nature and value of works of the literary past and their relation to the literature of the present. ‘Tradition’ like ‘canon’ was used as a critical primitive, but where the notion of a secular canon of artworks has been formed on the model of a canon of scripture, essentially a technical concept, the notion of ‘tradition’ has a broad range of applications in various spheres of life which provides a broad commonsense basis for its use in literary studies and art history.
