摘要：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, 4 th 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. 1 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.
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