ABSTRACT
It is axiomatic that the literary canon mutates over time. Even at a single moment, moreover, and within a given nation or society, it is perhaps misleading to speak of the literary canon; there are rather multiple canons, sometimes coexisting in a peace allowed by mutual disregard and sometimes actively competing for cultural authority. While debates in Europe and America over the last two decades have focused on conflicts motivated by divergent visions of ethnic, religious, and gender identity, even within a relatively homogeneous society struggles over the canon are guaranteed by the structural logic of what Pierre Bourdieu calls the literary field-the network of various actors and interest groups involved in the material and symbolic production of what a given society defines as literature. At any moment in time, a variety of agents are engaged in negotiating both the distribution of cultural capital, one of the fruits of which is canonicity, and the status that confers the right to have a say in the ongoing process of distribution. It is in good measure the synchronic tensions, negotiations, and contestations between the various canon-makers, actual and potential, that generate diachronic shifts in “the” canon.
