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What is the canon? Usually this question is just a proxy for something like, "Which works are in the canon?" But the first question is not just a concise version of the second, or at least it doesn’t have to be. Instead, it can ask what the structure of the canon is - in other words, when things are in the canon, what are they in? This question came to the fore during the project that resulted in Pamphlet 11. The members of that group were looking for morphological differences between the canon and the archive. The latter they define, straightforwardly and capaciously, as "that portion of published literature that has been preserved—in libraries and elsewhere" The canon is a slipperier concept; the authors speak instead of multiple canons, like the books preserved in the Chadwyck-Healey Nineteenth-Century Fiction Collection, the constituents of the six different "best-twentieth century novels" lists analyzed by Mark Algee-Hewitt and Mark McGurl in Pamphlet 8, authors included in the British Dictionary of National Biography, and so forth. [...] This last conundrum points the way out of these difficulties and into a workable model of the structure of the canon. It suggests two different ways of entering the canon: being read by many and being prized by an elite few—or, to use the terms arrived at in Pamphlet 11, popularity and prestige. With these two dimensions, we arrive at a canonical space [...].
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