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... LITERATURE we criticize and theorize about is never the whole. At most we talk about sizable subsets of the writers and works of the past. This limited field is the current literary canon. Some have argued that much the same is true of individual works: that an "elasticity" in the literary artifact permits us to attend now to small samples, now to larger traditions and groupings of which the work in its unitary sense forms a mere constituent. This may be true in part, although much has still to be said on the side of the artifact's integrity. But however that may be, few will dispute the elasticity of literature. The literary canon varies obviously-as well as unobviously-from age to age and reader to reader. The Dame Mutability who produces these marvelous changes has often been identified with fashion. Isaac D'Israeli, an early proponent of this view, argued that "prose and verse have been regulated by the same caprice that cuts our coats and cocks our hats," and concluded his essay on literary fashion with the claim that "different times, then, are regulated by different tastes. What makes a strong impression on the public at one time, ceases to interest it at another ... and every age of modern literature might, perhaps, admit of a new classification, by dividing it into its periods of fashionable literature."' Now fashion's claim to rule is not easily denied. A desire for novelty, which we should not undervalue, has much to do with pleasure in literary form. Nevertheless, "taste" is more than fashion and should not be subordinated to trivial laws of circumstance. But to recognize taste for what it is, we need at least to glimpse its involvement in multifarious processes, many of them apparently quite unconnected with literature. Their variety, which is the subject of Kellett's challenging essay The Whirligig of Taste, calls for extended study. In the present paper I shall look at only one determinant, genre. As soon as one thinks of genre in relation to taste, one is struck by how many of D'Israeli's instances of displaced fashions are described in generic or modal terms: "the brilliant era of epigrammatic points," "another age was deluged by a million of sonnets," "an age of epics," Copyright© 1979 by New Literary History, The University of Virginia NEW LITERARY HISTORY "dream" (i.e., dream vision), "satires," "romance," "tragedies," "comedies." In fact, changes in the literary canon may often be referred to revaluation or devaluation of the genres that the canonical works represent. The official canon, however, is sometimes spoken of as pretty stable, if not "totally coherent." And the idea of canon certainly implies a collection of works enjoying an exclusive completeness (at least for a time). Yet the biblical canon was arrived at only after many vicissitudes and over a period of many centuries. At each stage it was categorically fixed (although subject to varying emphases, conciliary, denominational, sectarian, individual); but when it enlarged or contracted, the new canon, too, was definitive. Moreover, canonical books of Scripture are not merely authentic but also authoritative. This normative sense has prompted a useful extension of the term to secular literature. Thus Curtius writes of "canon formation in literature [that] must always proceed to a selection of classics" and that embodies itself in lists of authors, curricula, histories of literature, and canons of taste. The current canon sets fixed limits to our understanding of literature, in several ways. The OFFICIAL CANON is institutionalized through education, patronage, and journalism. But each individual has also his PERSONAL CANON, works he happens to know and value.