This essay disputes John Guillory’s contention that the canon was formed in the medium of the school syllabus. I take to be exemplary of the canon the list of authors arranged by period found in the Norton Anthology, 4th ed. (Abrams). Not much changed in the Norton’s table of contents between the first edition, published in 1962, and the fourth, published in 1979.@The fourth edition contains two women authors, Anne Finch and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, that the 2nd edition of 1968 did not; it also contains scientific prose, including John Locke, whereas the 2nd edition contained only Bacon. By the sixth edition of 1993, the editors began to add women writers to the predominantly male list, but, in doing so, they also added more men: in other words, at that moment, the Norton table of contents changed principles from giving us a canon of great authors and works organized by period to giving us historical information. Of the seventh edition under the new general editorship of Greenblatt, Leah Price wrote, “This latest Norton enables readers to engage in what Stephen Greenblatt has elsewhere called ‘speaking with the dead’ – not only the proverbial dead white males but a good many others.” One doesn’t add women to a canonical table of contents and get another, different canon: one gets a view of cultural rather than artistic poetics, that is to say, all kinds of writing, great and otherwise.

    In addition to disputing the medium of canon formation, I will also argue against many scholars’ dating of its emergence. Douglas Lane Patey, Jonathan Kramnick, John Guillory, Trevor Ross, Alvin Kernan, and Thomas Bonnell argue that our current notion of the canon of English literature came into existence in Britain during the mid-eighteenth century.@It seems to me that Patey avoids his own insight when he says that “The aestheticization of literature [in the Romantic era] revis[ed] the canon” (27): he should have said, transformed a list into a canon, given his earlier arguments (18). That misdating is precisely what allows us to ignore the canon’s dependence on medium, on a materially determined mode of presentation.

    From roughly 1800 to 2000, the disciplinary anthology’s table of contents has given us a mode of cognizing or carving up the world of literary history, and that mode is tied indelibly to a particular interface, the disciplinary anthology’s table of contents. As I will show, our notions of period, canon, and literature – those that dominated the twentieth century – begin to emerge with publication of the first disciplinary anthologies in 1825 and 1831. William Hazlitt’s Specimens of the English Poets was the first poetry collection to look like our Norton and to contain a canonical list of authors.@The version of it printed in 1824 was not mass-printed, not produced for sale, until after its table of contents page had been altered. The living authors were removed from the 1824 version, the proverbial dead white males alone appearing in the 1825 edition that was finally produced and disseminated. This anthology, as opposed to all the miscellaneous poetry collections and collections of “beauties” that went before it,@I define both types shortly. transformed British poetry from a series of publication events into a discipline. Collections edited by Robert Southey, one in 1799-1800, one in 1809, and the last in 1831, begin to separate works of historical interest, antiquarian “curiosities,” from canonical works of earlier periods by confining each to their own kind of book.

    Hazlitt and Southey did not of course invent English literary history but rather helped to establish a set of protocols for the disciplinary anthology and its Other, the poetry collection that provides merely “historical context.” By “disciplinary anthology,” I mean a collection of poetry which organizes into past literary periods a short list of male authors, all deceased, as those alone who can participate in a trans-historical conversation about what constitutes the literary and literary tradition as well as in exemplifying the spirit of their age far better than any of their contemporaries. The disciplinary anthology had long been in the making and “stuck” no doubt – that is, it became a dominant medium for reproducing poetry in print -- because its system for organizing literature worked so well with the new reviews (Edinburgh, Quarterly, Monthly) that were attempting “to forge a unity that would replace the disintegrated public sphere” (Ferris 24), the “discipline” of English Literature. @The rise of the discipline of English is, of course, historically overdetermined. Other accounts, be they complimentary or competing, might make more sense in other interpretive contexts. For those accounts, see Court, Crawford, Engel, Moran, Scholes, Soffer, and Wellek (Rise).