This chapter examines the literary institutions that helped American short fiction to flourish in the twentieth century and maintain its visibility today. These institutions, from the Best American Short Stories and the New Yorker, to the Pushcart Prize and the National Book Award, form a kind of patchwork canon of American short fiction, a record of the writers most celebrated in their moment and most remembered since. Despite the persistent notion, espoused by artists and scholars alike, that the short story is “the art form best suited for the description” of a diverse and “heterogeneous culture,” these institutions also testify to the fact that the genre has, until very recently, underrepresented women and overlooked racialized writers. This chapter documents the writers that these organizations have consecrated, examining how that patchwork canon has often failed to live up to the ideals of cultural pluralism at the heart of the American short story tradition.

This chapter considers the popularity of the genre of the short story in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores, in particular, a class of magazine stories for which the terms of approval followed the lines of reading for amusement and entertainment. Surveying critical accounts of the short story, and the burgeoning interest in anthologies and handbooks for aspiring writers, the chapter considers what follows if we not only accept but accentuate the notion of the genre as an artistic commodity in a gendered marketplace defined by overabundance. Special consideration is given to the subgenre of “storiettes” published alongside a column covering “the latest fads” in Munsey’s magazine. The essay argues that the style of the period’s short story developed in tandem with ideas about it as a fashionable and consumable commodity, and even as something of a fad.

The canon of British First World War poetry seems well established and beyond dispute with a set of key ‘representative’ poets referenced continuously. Yet these poets have been selected and promoted over the decades for various reasons. Moreover, how representative were they of the British experience and reaction to the events 1914–1918? Using a quantitative study of the poets and poems appearing in anthologies during and after the war, this essay reconsiders the true canon of the British poetical response to the war charting the rise (and fall) of certain poets and why this might be so. It also considers the hidden canon of poetry that focuses on other theatres of war, at sea and in the air.

Although Langston Hughes remains one of our most widely published authors, few attempts have been made to chart the circulation of his works across dozens of anthologies during the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Yet an examination of 180 collections published over more than ninety-five years shows how editors collectively made Hughes a representative and at the same time exceptional black writer. The authors of this chapter use data management and analyses to understand a variety of patterns associated with the extensive processes of anthologizing Langston Hughes from 1923 through 2020. Their project reveals how Hughes reprints make him a statistical outlier, not merely widely published, and further, their research indicates the importance of incorporating quantitative approaches into the study of African American publishing history.

This chapter surveys the formation of German vernacular literature between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. Instead of one single beginning, from which all the rest flows, we encounter a series of inaugural gestures and moments of inception, not all of which extended into posterity. The great monuments of Old High German literature, produced in the ninth century, are isolated works that did not give rise to continuous traditions of textual production; for that development, we have to wait until the second half of the eleventh century, when an astonishingly self-assured and formally sophisticated literature – now linguistically Middle High German – burst onto the scene. In the course of the twelfth century, religious genres were joined by secular ones, and the pragmatic functions of informing and instructing the public were supplemented by an interest in the potentialities of poetic language and distinctly literary modes of cognition. Finally, by the early thirteenth century, a palpable sense had emerged among collectors and authors that German literature has both a canon and a history; the constitution of manuscript anthologies and literary genealogies represents a further beginning in the formation of German literature as a dynamic system, as well as itself positing beginnings.

This essay reflects on how Indigenous communities have maintained their own literary canons, often outside the mechanisms that literary scholars tend to associate with canonicity: large institutional archives, formal publishing and republishing, placement in major anthologies and college syllabi. The essay argues that Indigenous canonicity is not a static tradition from which texts can be either lost or added; it is not a privatized or extractive business. Rather, it is a collective, contributive process in which tribal members share in the multiple functions of editing, archiving, writing, reading, interpreting, and publishing. These community-based processes and conversations turn up a wealth of essays, poems, recipes, and histories that haven’t typically attracted the attention of settler teachers, publishers, or collecting institutions – perhaps because they were not written for settlers. The Indigenous literary histories that Indigenous communities remember and cherish, instead, document and imagine who the people are, where they come from, and where they are going. The essay concludes with a reflection on Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks’s notion of “the gathering place” – referring to any collective exercise of Indigenous cultural authority and exchange – as a model of Indigenous writing and canon making.

How to compile a collection of essays or an anthology and find a publisher for it.

establishes Speght’s position within a Calvinist community of writers, preachers, and printers that included her father and husband. Like Whately’s sermons, Speght’s A Mouzell for Melastomus (1617) deploys domestic and biblical rhetoric to give “good councell” in the political realm. If, for Speght, the doctrine of male superiority becomes a manifesto of the obligations of the ruler, the wife is authorized to enforce those obligations as a significant influence on her husband’s ability to exercise good government. In her later work Mortalities Memorandum (1621), Speght offers a prefatory Dreame in which a distinctively female voice provides a Calvinist framework for the pursuit of godly knowledge that draws on the Song of Songs. Mortalities Memorandum, the lengthy poem that follows, capitalizes on this voice to deliver a significant religious and political message to English men and women at a crisis point in their history.

The ability of Irish poetry to secure a place in the canon is intimately tied to structures of power and authority – structures with a strongly gendered character. Historically, the Irish tradition has been fractured by numerous traumas and the programmatic exclusion of poetry by women. Anthologies are key drivers in canon formation, but have been heavily slanted against equal representation of male and female poets. Often, women will achieve representation in one anthology only to disappear from view in the next; and applying a historical overview, we find that the twentieth century is often worse in this regard than previous eras. A number of case studies are considered, with close attention to questions of group dynamics, literary movements, citationality, and the role of the academy and the anthology.

Whether in its pre- or post-Troubles incarnations, the tradition of Northern Irish poetry has been largely male. In the early days of Northern Ireland, women would publish in journals but struggle to achieve publication in book form, as in the case of Barbara Hunter, the co-editor of the influential journal Rann. Poets such as Elizabeth Shane and May Morton reinvigorate the ballad tradition and feminise the landscape then being argued over in largely masculinist terms by John Hewitt and other critical ideologues. The figure of Freda Laughton stands out, publishing one collection and vanishing from print. Her coolly mysterious poems have become emblematic of a mid-century Northern modernist moment that failed to achieve traction. The post-Troubles generation that followed were no less slow to number any women in their ranks, but in restoring these marginalised voices to the record a different picture of Northern Irish poetry in its true diversity is possible.

Beginning in the early 1970s, scholars have been recovering an Asian American literary archive. The first anthologies of Asian American literature defined the field in divergent ways. Some focused on US-born writers and a politics of cultural nationalism. Others embraced a wider range of writers and a variety of political positions. The second wave of anthologies and scholarly discussions reacted against more limited views of Asian American literature and extended the field to encompass more women writers, genres such as poetry and drama, works written before the 1960s, and authors from beyond those of East Asian descent. Depending on the particular project, recovery has meant unearthing forgotten writings, revaluing discounted or discredited texts, or rethinking the sociopolitical context of works. Recovery continues today in print and digital editions released by both independent and mainstream publishers. Questions remain about which authors and works deserve recovery, and the stakes are high since inclusion in a canon can serve as a proxy for inclusion in a culture.

The history of literary production in Ireland shows a traumatic cleavage between the Irish-Gaelic and English languages. The history of literary reception and canonicity shows, however, a bicultural literary continuum, constructed, from the early to mid-nineteenth century on, mainly by a tradition of anthologizing. This tradition still continues and incorporates both the production of scholarly text editions and poem collections for the general readership.

This chapter brings print and manuscript commonplace books into dialogue with anti-theatrical diatribes and defences of poetry in order to establish that literary taste, usually dated to the eighteenth century, emerges much earlier in the humanist trope of the reader as bee, using the sense of taste to discriminate between rhetorical ‘flowers’. Through a reading of Anne Southwell's commonplace book, I claim that in the context of humoral psychology, this trope possessed a literal dimension: contemporary sensitivity to the flavour of gall ink corresponds to the suggestion that literary judgement is exercised through actual acts of tasting. Focusing on Ben Jonson’s paratexts, I submit that this has implications for how we understand the politics of taste: locating judgement at the bottom of the sensory hierarchy, ‘taste’ democratises critical authority.

This chapter attends to how the use of ‘black’ as a political aesthetic but contested signifier developed throughout the1970s and 1980s, and impacted on literary production. Partly due to such literary and political alliances, pioneering works such as the first ‘black British’ poetry collection, News for Babylon (1984), ground-breaking anthologies of women’s voices such as Watchers and Seekers (1987) or E. A. Markham’s 1989 selection of black and Caribbean poetry, Hinterland, appeared. The voices of new collectives such as the Asian Women’s Writers, Tara Arts or the Southall Black Sisters were published in the 1980s alongside periodicals like Artrage and Wasafiri which began to embed and inscribe black and Asian literary and artistic culture into Britain. This chapter explores the cultural and political landscape of this formative period and charts how these key literary and cultural initiatives opened up the borders of British writing. Discussing the difficult relations between arts sponsorship, policy-making, and creativity, the chapter explores how various pigeon-holes, whether of race, multiculturalism, or cultural diversity have at times limited understanding and serious critical appreciations of the range of black and Asian creative practice.

As the long shadow of Tennyson began to retreat in the 1880s, poetry found itself without clear directions for form or content. The temporality of the decade is a kind of anti-teleological anticipation--poets felt that something new needed to happen, but what that advent was remained unspecified. These conditions left a space for ‘minor poetry’, a term that implies not a position on a scale of value but a field of innovation and experimentation. This chapter first surveys the way this shifting ground is captured in anthologies, and discusses how the poetry of the decade resists easy capture in literary history. It then goes on to explore how the temporality of the 1880s is reflected in W. E. Henley’s ‘In Hospital’ sequence of lyric poems.