Canonicity and canon-formation became the talking point in higher education. But the real shift in attitude came in the Eighties, when Marxists, feminists, multiculturalists and deconstructionists denounced the canon as a white male imperialist fabrication, a desperate use of culture to uphold political authority. There was further dislodgement in the Sixties and Seventies when universities met the demand for greater 'relevance' and contemporaneity. The change began as early as the Fifties, when the supremacy of European culture in Humanities faculties began to be eroded as American Studies grew. All that has changed, especially in America. But no one then thought there was anything odd about a list of great books. He believed in minority culture (as Bloom does), and relished the idea that though the canon, like Oxbridge, was in theory open to everyone, it was also hard to get into. The problems come when the canon is misused as a pedagogic hammer and literary- critical machine-gun, as it was in Leavis's The Great Tradition (1948), which begins: 'The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad - to stop for the moment at that comparatively safe point in history.' Leavis later added D H Lawrence, but not Dickens, Fielding, Richardson, the Brontes, Woolf or Joyce. Publishers, too, have been known to commission books with titles such as The Hundred Best Modern Novels, often paying very decent advances for what may be, in effect, only the briefest of critical guides. Newspapers publish them in the form of weekly bestseller charts (whose only yardstick is sales) and, each Christmas, as 'Books of the Year' (whose only yardstick should be quality, though, as Julie Burchill approvingly describes it, this annual convention can also be a way for authors to 'send their season's greetings to friends'). It's a childish habit but children of all ages do it - even childrenof 64 like the American critic Harold Bloom, whose book, The Western Canon, with its short-list of 26 great authors and its long-list of 850 worthwhile ones, was the subject of controversy when published in the US two months ago and is certain t o generate further discussion when it is published in Britain in two weeks' time.īook lists are now an established part of our culture. EVERYONE makes lists - don't-forget lists of things to buy or do, but also sorting-out lists of favourite records and films, fantasy football teams, all-time-great cricketers and so on.

Bloom the western canon