“The Slaughterhouse of Literature”, 2000-03-01 (; backlinks; similar):
The history of the world is the slaughterhouse of the world, reads a famous Hegelian aphorism; and of literature. The majority of books disappear forever—and “majority” actually misses the point: if we set today’s canon of 19th-century British novels at two hundred titles (which is a very high figure), they would still be only about 0.5 percent of all published novels.
[Literature paper by Franco Moretti. Moretti considers the vast production of literature of which only the slightest fraction is still read and studied as part of a ‘canon’. Canons are formed by market forces, leading to preservation and reading in a feedback loop—far from academics selecting the best based on esthetic grounds. Moretti offers a case study of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes by comparing to all the now-forgotten competing detective fiction, to study the evolution of the idea of a ‘clue’; his competitors reveal its difficult evolution and how everyone groped towards it. Surprisingly, clues were neither obvious nor popular nor showed any clear evolution towards success. This raises puzzling questions about how to create and interpret ‘literary history’.]
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