Either – or? Ideology and Aesthetic Quality in Literary Canonization
Keywords:
literary theory, literary canon, literary axiology, literary aesthetics, literature and ideology, English literature, Shakespeare, William, Brooke, Arthur, thematology, literary themes – Romeo and JulietAbstract
Traditional explanations of literary canonization usually involve two concepts: power and beauty. To some, the canon is the result of power conflicts, resulting in a text selection that is largely dominated by ideological content. Rejecting this view as a political simplification that has little to do with the nature of literature, others invoke aesthetic quality as the main criterion for a text’s inclusion in the canon. In this article I will argue that this opposition is itself a misconstruction, since both ideology and aesthetic matters play a role in canonization – although the ideological component plays a dramatically different role from what has been assumed by (neo-)Marxist and poststructuralist scholars. I will illustrate my argument with an analysis of the content and form of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, as compared with its near-contemporary The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke. This analysis first follows a more traditional model of textual analysis, which is then further corroborated by an independent computer analysis of the same texts.References
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