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Literature vocabulary · Criticism and Analysis

Canon

Meaning in literature, with examples

/ˈkænən/nounCommon term

In literature, canon means: The group of works generally accepted as the most important and influential in a literature, which are widely taught, studied and reprinted.

In Turkish: kanon, edebi kanon, klasikler listesi

How it is used

Common in debates about what to teach and read. Works enter, join or are excluded from the canon; critics call for expanding or challenging it to include more women, minority and non-Western writers. Harold Bloom's The Western Canon (1994) is a well-known defense of it.

Example sentences

  1. Should contemporary Turkish novels be part of the literary canon taught in schools?

  2. Many women writers were left out of the canon for over a century.

Common collocations

  • the literary canon
  • the Western canon
  • enter the canon
  • challenge the canon
  • canonical text
  • literary criticismThe study, interpretation and evaluation of literary works, including discussion of their meaning, form, context and value.
  • literatureWritten works, such as novels, poems and plays, that are valued for their artistic quality and the way they use language, and the study of these works.
  • feminist criticismAn approach to literature that examines how texts represent women and gender, how power works between the sexes, and why women writers have been ignored.
  • literary theoryThe study of the ideas and methods used to read and interpret literature, such as structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism and postcolonial theory.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Criticism and Analysis

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