Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation

Cultural Capital is a seminal text on the literary canon, reconsidering the social basis for aesthetic judgment and exposing the unequal distribution of symbolic and linguistic knowledge. Now, more than ever, its insights are relevant in the face of the crisis of the canon and the crisis of the humanities.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 440 pages
Publication date: 31 October 2023
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

An expansive reissue commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of John Guillory's influential work on the literary canon. Since its release in 1993, Cultural Capital has served as a pivotal text for comprehending the codification and applications of the literary canon. Cultural Capital reevaluates the societal foundations of aesthetic judgment and unveils the unequal distribution of symbolic and linguistic knowledge upon which culture has long been established. Drawing from Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, Guillory contends that canon formation must be understood less as a matter of representing social groups and more as a matter of distributing cultural capital within schools, which govern access to literacy, reading, and writing practices.

Now, as the crisis of the canon has metamorphosed into the so-called crisis of the humanities, Guillory's groundbreaking, incisive work has never been more pressing. As scholar and critic Merve Emre writes in her introduction to this expanded edition: "Exclusion, selection, reflection, representation—these are the terms upon which the canon wars of the last century were fought, and the terms that continue to inform debates about, for instance, decolonizing the curriculum and the rhetoric of antiracist pedagogy."

Dimension: 229 x 152 x 43 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780226830599
Edition number: Enlarged