Students are often demand to read employment of “ Great Literature . ” They ’re assigned novels by giants like Hawthorne , Dostoyevsky , and Dickens , and are told these works are consider “ classic ” or “ important , ” and that they ’re somehow dissimilar from the vampire novels , crime thriller , and funnies that are read for fun . But at what spot does fiction become literature ? And who gets to decide which works make the cold shoulder ?
To read the construct of literature , we have to move around back to the 18th century , when the way citizenry approached writing began to fundamentally change . Initially , the Latin wordlitteraturawas used to refer to all write works , but in the 1700s , intellectual commence consciously develop an English literary canyon , choosing a trunk of modern English - speech whole kit and caboodle that they believe could abide up to ancient classics by the like of Homer and Virgil . Essayist Arthur KrystalexplainedinHarpersthat the idea was essentially to come up with a list of big works by English authors to create a “ national lit . " Gradually , lit did n’t admit all penning , just a few exemplary works .
Over the next few centuries , scholar , writers , critic , and publishers would continuously define and redefine what was turn over lit . Nineteenth century publishing party would put out anthologies and collections , canonizing select work by announcing their greatness . In the other 20th century , academics like John Erskine , Mortimer Adler , and Robert Hutchins set out promoting a " Great Books " collegecurriculum , commit their professional life to pick out " Great Books " and developing their criteria of " Greatness . " Like the eighteenth century English intellectuals who wanted to develop a home lit , Erskine and his age bracket want to further anAmerican literary culture .
Literature has always been an amorphous concept , one that changes whenever unlike groups attempt to delimitate " Great Literature . " And , in the 20th and twenty-first century , it ’s only become progressively blurry , as critic and reader question the literary hierarchy , noting that lists of peachy book tend to ignore works by female , minority , and non - Western author . Whilesome intellectualscontinue to canonize individual kit and boodle and authors , others indicate that the very construct of literature is at best subjective and at worst oppressive .
“ inevitably , booksellers and publishers are gatekeepers , pull in these conclusion to suit their market place and make their product wanton to buy , ” says Sian Cain , the books web site editor program forThe Guardian . “ What one person regards as an outstanding example of literature , another will consider drool . ”
Nowadays , lit is a more contested family than it was in the 18th and nineteenth century . More hoi polloi are literate and educated now than when a fistful of intellectual could decide what constituted great penning . And , thanks to the cyberspace , more hoi polloi than ever before are able to participate in literary debate . It ’s not just the voices of critic and publisher that are heard . As author Daniel Mendelsohn observe inThe New York Times , “ Today , audiences as well as critics toy a racy role in establishing which work get hash out , analyzed , acknowledge ; the boil of resentment toward the literary gods — the Dionysuses who alone were once favour to enshrine authors — has been lance . ”
But that does n’t mean the distinction between pop novels and literature has been eliminated . The conversation may have opened up , but publishers , critics , educator , and referee still screw categorizing unlike sort of written material , distinguishing between literary genre novels and literary fiction ; between ephemeral body of work and classical literature . The lines may become more and more smudge , but one require only to look at a few recent " Great Novels " lists to see how much consensus still be . ( For instance , compare these lists byTheGuardianandModern Library . )
