Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

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Volume 6 Number 2, August 2005

Special Issue: Literary Universals

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The Diachronic Canon:

Two Possible Universals in the Evolution of Literary Anthologies¹

by

Christopher M. Kuipers

Indiana University of Pennsylvania

 

ABSTRACT:  Literary universals are typically conceived as synchronic, but there are literary universals that are diachronic as well, just as there is a diachronic dimension to language universals.  The patterns exhibited over time by changing canons, as embodied in anthologies, are examples of these diachronic literary universals.  In particular, two dominant patterns emerge over the history of various anthology traditions in world literature.  The first is an oscillating pattern in which the continual growth of successive versions of an anthology is countered by periodic re-selections.  The second universal is a corollary of the first:  the oscillating pattern of growth and re-selection is expressed through re-articulations of the anthology (that is, through dividing or grouping the anthology’s materials, as by genre or theme).  These two diachronic universals are explored in three anthology traditions:  contemporary college teaching anthologies, The Greek Anthology, and the imperial poetry anthologies of Japan.  The article concludes that at least some of the universals of literary canons may be discerned through book history, that is, the history of canonical book forms like the anthology.

 

The project of literary universals is an ambitious one:  it proposes that there are empirically significant patterns that recur in literatures widely separated by time and place.  A proof of such patterns is that they appear even in traditions that have no direct cultural influence on each other.  Another proof is that literary universals reappear both among and within traditions across time.  The aim of this article is to explore one problematic literary concept, the “canon,” from the perspective of literary universals.  At its most basic, a “canon” is “an accepted list of authoritative texts.”  Typically, as in the heated discourse surrounding the Theory Wars of the 1980’s and 90’s, a canon is taken to be entirely relative to a given culture.  However, there is strong evidence that a canon is also a transnational and transhistorical concept, and one of the places where this concept can be seen operating most plainly is in the literary anthology (Kuipers, 2003).

Because it is a popular book form that is widely attested in almost every literary tradition around the globe, the anthology is an excellent place to look for universal patterns.  As we already understand from the ubiquitous literary collections that we associate with the term, the anthology is the embodiment of a process of selection, which produces literary collections with a variety of specific boundaries.  Because selection is such a basic cognitive process, the global history of anthologies reveals several common patterns of origin and evolution, and here, I argue, is where several literary universals of canonization lie.  As appropriate in the search for literary universals, the cases I examine are widely separated in their periods, their nations and languages, and their individual genres, ranging from the Western classical and medieval Greek Anthology, to Japanese national anthologies such as the Man’yoshu and the Kokinshu, to the college teaching anthologies utilized in many of today’s literature courses.

Because anthologies are popular forms and thus well-attested within their individual traditions, the literary universals that characterize them can be traced historically.  Thus this investigation explores an important secondary dimension of literary universals:  that is, in addition to recurring in static forms across time, literary universals may also develop in predictable ways within time.  Certainly many literary universals are synchronic, but diachronic, developmental, or evolutionary universals are likewise possible.  Moreover, language universals—the inspiration for literary universals—themselves have a fundamental diachronic dimension (see Bybee, 1988; Bybee, forthcoming).  The basic argument of this article is that the global history of the literary anthology exhibits such diachronic or developmental universals.  The ramification for the general problem of canonicity is that it, too, inevitably changes over time according to certain universal evolutionary patterns.

Although this evolutionary approach does seek to suggest a new diachronic dimension for literary universals, it nonetheless builds upon the basic synchronic methodology of the field.  Several key technical terms regarding literary universals are thus useful for framing this approach (for an introduction to this terminology, see Hogan, 2003c).  First, any study of the universals of anthologies in world literature cannot seek any absolute universal, since anthologies—defined as intentionally aesthetic collections, rather than “miscellanies,” or mechanical gatherings of works—do not appear to occur in all literary traditions (limited here to those that have writing systems).  Nevertheless, this basic logical universal, that collections of texts must either be gathered with rhyme and reason, or otherwise haphazardly, points to an empirical universal.  That is, collections of texts are not randomly distributed between these two logical alternatives, but are much more likely to exhibit intentional principles of selection and ordering.  Even medieval miscellanies, for example, those manuscript books where various genetically and generically unrelated texts were copied together, exhibit distinct principles of arrangement (see Nichols and Wenzel, 1996).

In addition to the statistical and empirical directions of this discussion, there is also a typological dimension to the universal patterns in anthologies:  that is, anthologies tend to follow one of a set of related patterns.  However, this does not imply that there is at work any “hegemonic” universal (see Pandit, 1995, 207), because, as suggested above, the global histories of anthologies examined here represent “a range of literary traditions” that adhere to “the general principle of genetic and areal distinctness [which] serves as an appropriate criterion for literary universals” (Hogan, 2003b, 17-18).  Even more to the point, the search for universals among anthologies in no way eliminates, but rather depends upon, a “thick description” of those anthologies in their local cultural context:  “Indeed, the study of universals and the study of cultural and historical particularity are mutually necessary” (Hogan, 2003b, 10).  One particular case—perhaps a far more self-reflexive one than literary scholars are accustomed to dealing with—forms the starting point of this investigation into the universal typology of the evolution of anthologies.

A Local Casebook:

Contemporary Teaching Anthologies

At times, literary universals should be not just empirically demonstrable, but even patently obvious.  To set the stage, I would point to one such palpable case:  namely the anthologies that surely all literature teachers and students have used at one time or another in literary survey courses.  As their editors are fully aware, contemporary literary anthologies function as the de facto canon for almost all introductory courses in literature, as well as many advanced ones.  But the canon here has certainly changed over time (and not only in price!).  Over the publication history of the Norton anthologies and other popular teaching collections, there are significant and conspicuous trends that suggest at two interrelated universals of the literary history of the anthology.

The first and most obvious universal change is one of increasing size.  Lining up the seven editions of The Norton Anthology of English Literature volume by volume, for example, shows that this bellwether anthology has gradually expanded through every edition (Abrams, et al., 1962-2001).  The inexorable growth can be measured on a variety of dimensions:  the number of pages, the physical size of pages, the number of selections, the average length of selections, the number of authors included, the amount of supplementary material, and so on.  A comparison of other competing publishers’ English, American, or world literature anthologies—including such self-conscious “innovators” such as The Longman Anthology of British Literature or The Heath Anthology of American Literature—shows the same basic pattern of continual expansion (Damrosch, et al., 1999-2003; Lauter, et al., 1990-2002).  In the beginning, the Norton may resemble what the metaphorical term “anthology” originally designated:  a “bouquet” or small collection of lyric poems.  (Each of its two 1962 volumes can be easily picked up and held with one hand, at least!)  But with each new edition, the anthology swells, gaining more and more material.  Certainly some selections do fall out of canonical fashion and are “de-selected,” but the overwhelming tendency is simply to add more material on top of what is already there.  This reflects the “glacial” tendency of canons (Harris, 1991, 113; Kuipers, 2003, 55-58):  once they have picked up a given author, anthologies will tend to keep at least some selections from that author.  Even if no one is reading (or at least assigning) John Greenleaf Whittier any longer, he is still well-represented to this day in volumes of American literature.

On the other hand, there is another corresponding side to this literary universal of expansion:  the growth of the anthology can also be checked or diverted at any given time.  For example, most major anthologies are available in “compact” or “shorter” editions of one kind or another.  Notably, these are always published after their counterparts:  they are selected out of the selections of the “longer” editions.  It is as if the anthology grows to a certain point and then fractures under its own weight.  This phenomenon is most starkly seen in the most recent editions of the Norton (both English and world literature versions) and the Longman anthologies, which are now being subdivided into six smaller volumes, and with virtually no change in contents.  A few of our students, at least, were well ahead of the publishers:  instructors have reported that some undergraduates, no doubt exhausted by the weighty proportions of the canon, have brought to class only the assigned pages for the day, having dutifully cut them out of their textbooks the night before.  Lazy or not, such actions show that the heavyweight canon can surprising quickly and easily revert to a “bouquet” once again.  I have described elsewhere this dynamic oscillation in the canon as a vacillation between the process of gathering and the process of selecting (Kuipers, 2003); here I would emphasize that this dynamic can be best observed as it is expressed diachronically.

The second universal historical tendency among literary collections is a corollary of this dynamic oscillation, and it too is easily observable  in the literary anthologies at hand.  This second diachronic universal is an increasing subarticulation.  This second process occurs alongside or within both the gradual growth and sudden reselection of anthologies.  “Subarticulation” often means subdividing an existing anthology by genre or theme, though it can be a purely mechanical partition, as in the move, cited above, from two heavy volumes to a handier six.  This pattern is thus a further conceptual consequence of the original selection:  it is a secondary selective process by which the burgeoning anthology rearticulates its intimidating and sprawling material into more usable and comprehensible subsections, and, sometimes, these subsections “calve off” to form reselections.   Unlike expansion, which usually operates gradually in anthologies (“a bit more of the same”), subdivision is a process that often manifests in fits and starts, since it requires the invention of new categories and divisions for the standing material.  Thus this second pattern of innovative subarticulation has appeared in a variety of ways in modern history of literature anthologies, but always with the purpose of somehow renewing the larger collected form.

A user of one of today’s literature anthologies may not recognize just how “articulated” that book has become since its origins not so long ago.  The purest kind of anthology would be organized almost randomly, such as alphabetically by title, and some of the earliest literary anthologies of the twentieth century use random organizations of this kind—especially those inspired by the practical criticism of I. A. Richards.  In his famous “experiments” of the 1920’s at the University of Cambridge, Richards selected diverse poems which he had printed, four to a sheet, shorn of title, author, and date, to see what his undergraduates could do with them (Richards, 1929).  This influential approach led to “clear” anthologies with no commentary or background on the selected works.  Perhaps the most well-known of these is that of Laurence Perrine (1956), an expanded version of which is currently in its tenth and posthumous edition (Arp and Johnson, 2002).  At the same time as Perrine’s landmark collection, the first “recognizable” Norton anthology emerges (Scully, Beatty, and Long, 1956).  It is already less random than the purposefully unadorned fashion of practical criticism:  to this day, the Nortons are organized primarily by the date of a work’s composition or first publication, meaning that there is a strong emphasis on groupings by historical period.  But there are other familiar articulating tendencies that appear in the Norton tradition, as when selections are grouped by individual authors, or by genre (the Romantic poets), or geographically, as in the case of world literature.  From the beginning of the Nortons there are also subsections, sometimes called “casebooks,” where even more limited generic and topical groupings are assembled (such as “The Medieval Lyric,” “World War I Poetry,” or “Victorian Issues:  Evolution and the Crisis of Faith”).

Even before with the Nortons and the competing publishers’ versions of English / American / world literature anthologies, there were also more general literature anthologies being produced for college audiences (e.g., Blair and Gerber, 1946; Blair and Gerber, 1948).  The proliferation of these general literature anthologies illustrates how far the universal pattern of subdivision can progress.  Rather than being organized by regions and historical periods, which still may produce discontinuous collocations of literary works, these literature collections take genre as their primary organizing principle, and the possibilities of generic divisions become more and more carefully defined and exploited over their history.  It is impossible to do full justice to this history here, since these general anthologies cater to the much broader “gen ed” and composition course market, and are thus more numerous and ephemeral than the British, American, or world literature anthologies, but broad patterns are nonetheless easily discernable (see Bloom, 1999).

Perhaps suggested by popular genre-oriented literary collections published for the general public earlier in the century, these multi-genre college anthologies begin to multiply in the 1960’s, around the time of the first Norton Anthology of English Literature (Barnet, Berman, and Burto, 1961; Schorer, 1967).  These are relatively “clear” anthologies in the I. A. Richards tradition, but are divided into three generic groupings:  fiction, poetry, and drama.  This is certainly not the only possible ordering (for an earlier alternative, see Blair and Gerber, 1959), but it became the canonical one.  This generic tripartition still characterizes such popular general literature anthologies as those recently published by Norton, Longman, Prentice Hall, and McGraw-Hill (Beaty, et al., 2001; Kennedy and Gioia, 2002; Roberts and Jacobs, 2003; DiYanni, 2002).  Another anthology forthcoming from Bedford/St. Martin’s, which claims to be fully multicultural for the new century, has likewise adopted this entirely traditional ordering of the three genres (Schakel and Ridl, forthcoming 2005).  Since these anthologies can also be marketed towards “composition and literature” courses as well as introductory literary surveys, many include “the essay” as a fourth genre in this modal catalogue—but if so, “the essay” is always fourth.

Some patterns of tradition and innovation in anthologies may certainly be chalked up to marketing pressures.  Anthology publishers are driven by two competing impulses:  to include a large portion of what other publishers are offering (for obvious reasons of recognizability and for substitutability), but also to have enough “fresh” material so that a change to the new textbook is worth the bother.  It is especially interesting to observe what the more recent three- or four-genre anthologies (loosely defined as those published in their first edition within the last three to five years) have done to make themselves appear more “cutting edge.”  Notably, of those recent offerings I have surveyed, not a single one has yet appeared which breaks with the traditional arrangement of fiction; poetry; drama (and essay, if included).  Instead, these newer works, like many newer editions of the older anthologies, have begun adding new groupings of material on top of (typically, after) the old.  It is as if the thematization of the genres themselves has reached a limit:  there is only so much that can be done with the traditional fictional elements of “character,” “setting,” “plot,” etc.; or the poetic elements of “meter,” “image,” “metaphor,” etc., etc.—for these generic subdivisions are unlikely to change much any time soon.

There are two main ways that literature anthologies have overcome the limits of the traditional generic subdivisions.  First, these newer anthologies have supplemented the three genres with in-depth “casebooks,” typically organized around a key movement in literature (e.g., the Harlem Renaissance), key writers of each genre (e.g., Emily Dickinson), or a classic work paired with cultural commentary and contemporary criticism (e.g., Antigone).  Most often, these casebooks are appended to the appropriate generic section (fiction, poetry, drama), but this again threatens to make the genres even more unwieldy.  Thus the other, supernumerary innovation that has appeared:  an entirely new section (or several sections) of a “thematic anthology” (or “anthologies”).  (A third kind of material might also be mentioned:  the addition of a section including actual students’ essays and commentary to illustrate how to write about literature.)  In other words, the old three-genre anthology has grown by adding entire anthologies-within-anthologies, organized on thematic rather than generic lines.  The limits of the generic division, where distinctions can become less meaningful when encompassing scores of unrelated works, are overcome by re-articulating the anthology to include more and more discrete divisions.

To illustrate how quickly a new innovation like the thematic anthology-in-an-anthology can become “canonical,” I have collected below the titles for five such sections from each of three recently published literature anthologies.  (It almost goes without saying that within these sub-anthologies, the same traditional divisions of fiction / poetry / drama / essay are strictly maintained.)  Besides the fact that each anthology has exactly five such sections, there are obvious parallels between several of the themes, and their ordering as well:

 

“Home and Family”

“Love and its Complications”

“Lessons from Life”

“The Natural and Unnatural”

“Culture and Identity”  (Meyer, 2001)

 

“Living in Families”

“Teaching and Learning”

“Loving”

“Doing Justice”

“Confronting Mortality” (Schilb and Clifford, 2003)

 

“Family and Friends”

“Women and Men”

“Heritage and Identity”

“Culture and Class”

“Faith and Doubt” (Madden, 2004)

 

As such anthologies-in-anthologies proliferate, it will be interesting to trace how certain oft-anthologized works fare under certain canonical themes:  will “A & P” always be one of the “Life Lessons”?  Will “Cathedral” be anthologized only under “Faith and Doubt”?

Whatever the results for individual canonical works, certain predictions are suggested by the two diachronic universals discussed above:  these thematic anthologies-in-anthologies will increase in both size and number, and they will also tend to subdivide in order to contain this growth.  The increasing prevalence of “and” in the fifteen thematic titles listed above suggests that the later universal is already at work.

A Global Casebook:

Two Anthologies of East and West

Although a number of world literature traditions present themselves as likely candidates for a study of patterns in the development of anthologies, full coverage of these disparate literary territories is impossible here.  Two of the global traditions of anthologies, however, seem to merit particularly close attention because of their dominant and well-attested positions over long periods of literary history:  one of these traditions is The Greek Anthology of the West, a vast and influential literary collection that slowly grew over 1400 years, and the other is the long line of imperial anthologies in Japan, which were inaugurated by the foundational (and often still considered the greatest) work of Japanese literature:  the Man’yoshu.  These anthology traditions of East and West are effectively isolated both from each other and from the contemporary strand of teaching anthologies analyzed above, but both nonetheless evince the same fundamental diachronic dynamics.

Whatever anthology an instructor may choose to assign in a literary survey course, the titular inspiration for that particular collected form lies in the Greek Anthology.  What connection does this seemingly unlikely metaphor of “bouquet” have to the global history of literary collections?  For a start, it is convenient that the floral metaphor can easily illustrate the concepts behind the two diachronic universals of anthologies.  On the one hand, anthologies tend to expand until they turn into virtual “gardens,” as Alan Cameron suggests of The Greek Anthology (see below) (1996, 102).  But likewise, at any time, any particular collected “garden” of literature can quickly yield any number of “bouquets”—the universal of rearticulation and reselection.  It is noteworthy that this conceptual  metaphor also shapes the unrelated Japanese tradition of anthologies discussed below.  As anthologies move beyond their titular metaphor and grow beyond the more manageable boundaries of a true “bunch” of poems, they are susceptible to yield various new bunches of poems, either through radical reselection or through gradual supplementation.

This metaphorical connection of “anthology” to the universals discussed here is borne out by the lengthy history The Greek Anthology (see  Cameron, 1993; Kuipers, 2003, 60-63).  When it came to be known by this title in the Middle Ages, The Greek Anthology had become a great compilation of epigrams and other short lyrics gathered over many centuries since the classical era.  The metaphor of poems as “flowers” is very common in the earliest epigrams to be collected.  Thus another early title word for such collections (as of Meleagar) was stephanos, the “garland” or “floral crown,” using the same botanical metaphor.  But it is also clear that by the end of a millennium and a half of collecting and re-editing, the Greek Anthology had reached a point where the metaphor of a bouquet was hardly appropriate; it was at least “a garden,” as Alan Cameron puts it, “containing the flowers and weeds of fifteen hundred years of Greek poetry” (1996, 102). The collection had in fact become a group of prior collections of many other editors, who had often selected generously from their own poetry as well.  The tendency of the Greek Anthology to preserve these earlier collections in longer uninterruped “runs” has allowed today’s scholars to make very educated guesses about how these earlier anthologies were organized (Gutzwiller, 1998).  Thus the Greek Anthology grew by the gradual addition of more and more thematic groups of poems—simultaneously illustrating both of the universals of growth and of rearticulation.  In the contemporary field of classics, an even more extreme rearticulation has taken place:  The Greek Anthology has been debrided of its medieval ingrowths and entirely reorganized by ancient author (Gow and Page, 1965; Gow and Page, 1968).

On the other hand, the formal appearance of the term “anthology” specifically designating a “collection of poetic ‘flowers’” occurred at a relatively late date in the history of The Greek Anthology and its related texts.  Nevertheless, it is also clear that the literary imagery of “anthology” had already long been in place in Greek literature before the name, and both name and metaphor would continue to be used to grasp conceptually the aesthetics and mechanics of collected writings through contemporary Western literary history.  Although the bulk of his collection is lost, Meleagar certainly intended his Stephanos or Garland to be a metaphorical anthology:  in the proem (now Greek Anthology, 4.1), Meleagar lists the various poets he has selected, and to each  poet is assigned a flower or a plant; in the collection’s final poem, Meleagar announces that he has finished plaiting the “flowers” of his garland of verse (Greek Anthology, 12.257.6).  Other poems preserved from his Garland show that Meleagar pursued all the variations of this living metaphor:  flowers could be poets, poems, or the beloveds addressed by the poets in the poems.  Meleagar’s own model may have been the Arcadian poet Nossis, whose work earned her favorable comparisons with Sappho; Nossis appears to be the first to make “metaphorical association of a collection of poetry with flowers” (Gutzwiller, 1998, 79).  It may be that anthology is a conceptual metaphor whose early history and universality bear further study (on conceptual metaphors, see Lakoff and Johnson, 1999).

Later in European literary history, however, the metaphor of “anthology” faltered.  The Greek Anthology was influential in the Middle Ages (Cameron, 1993), when it became a model for various other collections (the Latin florilegium).  In the Renaissance, the metaphor of the anthology appeared briefly once again in the pun of “posy” (a word for “nosegay, bouquet” that sounds like  “poesy” or “poetry”).  Nevertheless, as literary collections flourished (as it were) in the early Age of Print, the name most often attached to them was miscellany.  It was not until the mid-twentieth century emergence of college literature collections that “anthology” reemerged as a dominant  title for the form.  This “broken” history of “anthology” seems to be a case of a contingent universal that suddenly appears at particular times as a vivid and convenient concept (Bordwell, 1996; Hogan, 2003c).  If so, this universal conceptual power of the metaphor of anthology seems to explain why it appears as an imagistic contingency in other major world literature traditions as well.

Perhaps the most memorable of these other metaphorical “anthology” traditions is in the literary history of poetry collections in Japan.  This history begins with the Man’yoshu, a collection of over 4,500 poems gathered in the late seventh and the first half of the eighth centuries AD of the Western calendar.  The historical and conceptual parallels with the first Western anthologies are striking, especially given their areal and genetic separation.  Like Meleagar’s Garland, the Man’yoshu seems to be based on earlier collections that are now lost, given the many centuries it covers.  Like Meleagar, the editor of the Man’yoshu, namely Otomo no Yakamochi, included a number of his own poems in the collection he was making.  Likewise, the botanical metaphor of collecting is a dominant one:  Man’yoshu means literally “Book of Ten Thousand Leaves,” and nature imagery is a dominant motif in the collection (Levy, 1981- ).  As in the famous leaf similes of the West (Sider, 1996), “leaves” in Japanese may also signify “human generations,” emphasizing the durability of this corpus of poems, and its enduring appeal (Keene, 1993, 88).  Later titles of Japanese imperial collections would refer again to the “anthology” metaphor:  the Kin’yoshu (compiled ca. 1105), or “Collection of Golden Leaves,” and the Shikakshu (compiled ca. 1151), or “Collection of Verbal Flowers” (Keene, 1993, 305-06, 314).

The extensive history of anthologies in Japan, which with the Kokinshu began to be sponsored by successive emperors, also follows the same dynamic patterns of change that characterize anthologies in Western literary history.  Just as the Greek Anthology included both pagan and Christian poets, so the Japanese anthologies gradually embraced both Chinese poems and poetic forms as well as pioneering distinctively Japanese scripts, forms, and aesthetics.  And just as the Greek epigram evolved by narrowing down from its various early beginnings (as inscriptions, toasts, boasts, and jokes) to the pointed epigram of wit, so the poetic forms in the Japanese anthologies were winnowed down so that larger genres eventually gave way to shorter ones such as the tanka, and finally to the tiny haiku.  Even by the Kokinshu, the longer and looser forms like the choka have almost completely disappeared, and the romantic and seasonally-oriented tanka (the precursor of the even shorter haiku) are starting to dominate (see Kato, 1979, 126-36).  Certainly each imperial anthology contained entirely new poems, but there was, in parallel with the Greek Anthology and the teaching anthologies discussed above, a remarkably conservative attitude in another respect:  the duplication of the twenty thematic and generic sections that were inaugurated in the Kokinshu.  All twenty sections kept being reproduced, even though some were much more popular than others.  In later collections, the poems devoted to love and to the seasons of change would prevail, especially spring with its cherry and plum blossoms, and autumn with its bright falling leaves (see McCullough, 1985, table 1).  Although the later anthologies might have expanded “miscellaneous” sections, it was the thematic grouping of poems in seasonal and romantic sections that predominate in these Japanese anthologies, and it is the equally ephemeral spring petal and autumn leaf—and the linking of these to the ephemerality of human life and love—that embody Japan’s most distinct contribution to world literature.

Of the three histories of literary anthologies discussed here, Japan’s is the one most open to criticism regarding its areal and genetic isolation.  Specifically, what influence over this tradition was wielded by the much older and well-respected literary collections of China?  Clearly, in Japan, as in Southeast Asia, there was considerable attention to Chinese language and literary forms; Japanese poets typically wrote in both languages, and the first Japanese writing system was borrowed from the Chinese.  However, regarding the Man’yoshu, which stands as the first great canonical work for Japanese literature as Homer does for the West, there is strong scholarly opinion that distances the poetry from Chinese models (Keene, 1993, 85-88).  For example, there are only a handful of poems among the thousands in the Man’yoshu that can be called Buddhist in inspiration (Levy, 1981- , 4-5).  What seems to be the case is that Chinese influence, present in at least a small degree in the Man’yoshu, became much stronger later, and can be seen much more clearly in the Kokinshu and subsequent Japanese imperial anthologies (McCullough, 1985, 6-7).  But in this process, as the imperial anthologies followed the path of generic and topical rearticulation, they nonetheless appealed to specific poetic forms and anthological organizations that had been pioneered in the bulky Man’yoshu.  Even the Man’yoshu’s 20-book format, probably a division of simple convenience (Keene, 1993, 91-92), became a canonical, carefully delineated ordering system in the Kokinshu and all later imperial collections.

The line of Japanese imperial anthologies, then, certainly embody the increasing thematization of the anthology tradition.  But what about the dynamic of continual expansion?  If the Man’yoshu is like the Greek Anthology in representing a large conglomeration of a variety of preceding poetic types, what about the line of imperial anthologies?  First, a number of the successive anthologies contain significantly more poems than the 1,111 tanka of the Kokinshu (compiled 905 A.D.):  the Gosenshu (compiled 951) contains about 1,400 poems, while the thirteenth-century Shinkokinshu, for instance, contains 1,981, yet some of the collections in the sequence are smaller than their predecessors.  Nevertheless, there is continual expansion from another perspectives in this long imperial tradition.  That is, the entire line of imperial anthologies can be viewed as one gradually expanding anthology of waka, or “short poetry,” with each succeeding anthology adding another emperor’s “chapter.”  This becomes obvious from many of the titles in the sequence.  The first, the Kokinshu, is an abbreviation of Kokin Waka Shu, or “Collection of Ancient and Modern Waka.” The second is the Gosenshu, or Gosen Waka Shu, the “Later Selection of Waka” (Keene, 1993, 277).   The third is Shuishu (compiled ca. 1005), or Shui Waka Shu, the “Collection of Waka Gleanings” (Keene, 1993, 283).  Even the Shinkokinshu (Shin Kokin Waka Shu), which is recognized as the most original collection after the Kokinshu, simply means a “New Collection of Ancient and Modern Waka.”  By contrast, it is possible that each new collection could have been imagined as a replacement of all the previous anthologies, just as new editions of college teaching anthologies are, but these titles make it clear that each successive imperial anthology was conceived as a supplement to the tradition.

And in this line of continual growth, there were also attempts to re-select and create smaller court anthologies out of the swelling tradition.  Thus Fujiwara Teika, a critic and poet himself anthologized in the great thirteenth-century Shinkokinshu, produced his model anthology Kindai Shuka, “Superior Poems of Our Time,” containing just 83 poems (Brower and Miner, 1967).  Interestingly, it is surmised that Teika’s source for the Kindai Shuka was his own collection Nishidaishu, a larger compilation of poems from the first eight of the imperial anthologies (Brower and Miner, 1967, 20).

Other Global Anthologies

The similarities among the three cases discussed above imply that their common patterns of expansion and rearticulation are statistical universals, appearing across more independent traditions than would be expected by chance.  This suggests two routes for further research.  First, additional independent anthology traditions need to be examined in order to ascertain how widespread these statistical universals are, and also whether they may be typological (e.g., universals covering all known anthology traditions).  Second, further attention should be paid to the precise ways in which anthologies grow and are subdivided, perhaps yielding further distinctive patterns in their historical development.

Because of the limits of the present study, many global anthology traditions that could have cast light on the above issues were neglected.  The following is a suggestive rather than exhaustive list of these traditions for future investigation, organized roughly by date:

• Collections of popular love songs recovered from the New Kingdom of ancient Egypt.  There are four fragmentary collections to be compared.

• The Shi Jing or Shih Ching of China (also known as The Classic of Poetry, The Book of Songs, or The Book of Odes).  Confucius is reputed to have culled these 300 famous poems from an earlier lost collection of 3,000.

• The classical Tamil anthologies of religious and secular verse of Southern India.  Representing a tradition independent from Sanskrit poetry, these eight collections are organized generically, with each genre given the name of a flower.

• Early anthologies of Arabic poetry.  These coexisted for some time alongside oral traditions of the Arabian peninsula, and later were the vehicle for poetic forms like the ghazal.

• Anthologies of shijo, a form of Korean poetry.  As with the Japanese anthologies discussed above, the influence of China appears to have been minimal over this vernacular song genre of Korea.

• Anthologies of haiku and senryu in Japan.  Poets including masters like Basho collaborated on these collections, which include The Monkey’s Raincoat; these “art” anthologies were not imperially sponsored.

• Buddhist anthologies of koans.  Gathered with various masters’ interpretations, these religious collections of cryptic “teaching stories” were produced in Japan, China, and Korea by adherents of Chan or Zen Buddhism.

This final area suggests yet another realm of literary collections:  the anthologies of religious texts better known as scriptures.  Primarily studied for theological and doctrinal purposes, scriptures may also reveal the same general historical dynamics of anthologies.  Scriptures are, in the end, a foundational model for literary canons everywhere.

Conclusion:

The Diachronic Canon as Book History

In a recent guide on the connections between cognitive science and the humanities, Patrick Colm Hogan has extended the field of reference of literary cognition to include the fine arts as well (Hogan, 2003a).  The fine arts can also include the book, when it is considered as an art object.  The anthologies discussed here certainly qualify as art objects, since they are gathered with aesthetic purpose using some manipulable material as a medium (in this case, other, briefer literary works).  The historical investigation of anthologies undertaken here, then, has been on some level an exercise in book history, or “the history of the book.”  In a stimulating comparison of the contemporaneous histories of the English anthology and the English novel, Leah Price has suggested that the field of book history has significant untapped critical resources (Price, 2000).  In the past, book history has been the province of bibliographers, librarians, and a few historians of art and technology.  I would also suggest that if the abiding mysteries of concepts like literary canons are to be unraveled, this is most likely to happen through a study of those book forms, including anthologies, that have been the conceptual vehicles of literary canons through time.  Book history should also be carried out, therefore, by students of literature, cognition, and literary theory.  Is there ever a literary text of any consequence that is not collected, at some moment in time, into something like a book?

 

Note

¹ A very different form of this article was presented at the 2003 Modern Language Association meeting in San Diego under the title “The Will to Anthologize: The Universality of Canonization.”  I would like to thank the organizer of that session on literary universals, Patrick Colm Hogan, for inviting the more substantial reflections offered here.  For a more detailed discussion of the conceptual dynamics that I assume, please see my earlier discussion of a “field theory” of the canon (Kuipers, 2003).

 

 

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