Premature canonisation

Books, not saints: or, it's not over until it's over.

How can you possibly even begin, less that 2 decades into a century, to even make A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Canon?

I was sitting here thinking, you know, if you had been doing this in 1818, there were books that had been published by then that I am pretty sure would not have been on lists like this (anything by Jane Austen, and Frankenstein, for starters). And ditto 1918, because I have seen those lists of bestsellers of the year and it is rarely enough that one sees any title that one recognises except possibly as a historical curiosity.

There's a chart here which lists Bestsellers (USA, I think) alongside 'Critically acclaimed and historically significant' works published in the same year, 1910-1919. I suspect that it took some while for critical acclaim and historical significance to accrue (Herland I may point out, as I remember delving into this for some reason once, was only published as a periodical serial in 1915 and not as a book until, I think, the 1970s, such are the whirligigs of time and reputation).

The Bestsellers 1900-1909.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

Most Popular Tags

aaaargh - 359 uses
academic - 646 uses
advice - 249 uses
age - 269 uses
animals - 346 uses
annoyance - 463 uses
archives - 460 uses
art - 369 uses
biography - 421 uses
books - 1349 uses
cooking - 1136 uses
crime - 254 uses
facile-preconceptions - 379 uses
fantasy - 280 uses
feminism - 651 uses
fiction - 280 uses
food - 319 uses
gender - 923 uses
health - 496 uses
history - 946 uses
homosexuality - 302 uses
internet - 261 uses
life - 262 uses
links - 361 uses
litcrit - 338 uses
litfic - 766 uses
london - 391 uses
marriage - 297 uses
masculinity - 555 uses
meme - 968 uses
mysteries - 534 uses
nature - 311 uses
politics - 267 uses
reading - 1247 uses
recipes - 1001 uses
relationships - 406 uses
religion - 357 uses
research - 390 uses
romance - 416 uses
sex - 435 uses
sff - 756 uses
social history - 502 uses
thrillers - 384 uses
travel - 478 uses
tropes - 345 uses
unexamined-assumptions - 556 uses
victorians - 322 uses
women - 978 uses
work - 327 uses
writers - 245 uses

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

malkingrey

I've actually read three or four of those (The Virginian, for one, and The Hound of the Baskervilles; also Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm), thanks to an adolescence spent in omnivorous reading in libraries that hadn't weeded their collections in, like, ever.

I note that Robert W. Chambers shows up a lot. Of course, the book of his that's stuck around isn't any one of those -- it's The King in Yellow, which is fin-de-siècle American weird.

oursin

I'd heard of a few and read a few - because of Claud Cockburn's book Bestseller! there was a time when I was keeping an eye out for e.g. The Rosary in secondhand bookshops. I'm always surprised at how popular in their day were the novels by HG Wells that nobody reads now (I've actually read a few of them, though not Mr Britling sees it through, and they are fairly justly neglected).

Edited (html fail pre coffee) Date: 2018-09-21 08:30 am (UTC)

Chambers used to be called "the shopgirls' Sheherazade", which is as neat a way for the literary establishment to denigrate both the author and his audience as I've ever encountered. On the other hand, he made a lot of money that way, and The King in Yellow (actually a collection of short stories) fed into the American horror and weird fantasy genre almost as much as Lovecraft's stuff did. (And Chambers was apparently a much nicer fellow than Lovecraft, to boot.)

castiron

I've heard of four of these, maybe five, and read three. About the only one I'd expect a large number of people to have heard of is Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm; it was still marketed as a children's classic when I was young. I love The Shuttle, though I have to skim the chapters that set up Nigel Anstruthers's abuse of Rosalie. And of course as a Holmes fan I've read Hound.

Persephone Press reissued The Shuttle some while ago. It might have been a bit of a shock to Persephone readers who had previously enjoyed The Making of a Marchioness!

It's Always More Complicated

The wandering thoughts of a wandering hedgehog