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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