Western canon

The Western canon is the body of high-culture literature, philosophy, art, music and architecture from the Western world, with works classified within it considered to be—and celebrated—as classics in the context of Western civilization. The concept has been discussed and debated in cultural criticism with regard to Western exceptionalism and which works constitute the canon, given the lack of official standardization of the category.

Literary canon

Classic book

A classic is an artistic work that has been accoladed and culturally circulated as being exemplary in its medium because of its distinctions, and noteworthy in history as a result of its cultural associations. In the second-century Roman miscellany Attic Nights, Aulus Gellius refers to writers as "classicus... scriptor, non proletarius" ("A distinguished, not a commonplace writer"). Such classification were initiated with the Greeks' ranking their cultural works, with the word canon (ancient Greek κανών, kanṓn: "measuring rod, standard"). Similarly, early Christian Church Fathers declared as canon the authoritative texts of the New Testament, preserving them given the expense of vellum and papyrus and mechanical book reproduction. Thus, being included in a canon ensured a book's preservation as the best way to retain information about a civilization. In contemporary use, the Western canon defines the best of Western culture. In the ancient world, at the Alexandrian Library, scholars coined the Greek term Hoi enkrithentes ("the admitted", "the included") to identify the writers in the canon.