From a local cultural perspective, canons are fixed forms or examples of cultural objects that keep a stable cultural value over time and thus point to fundamental features of a given cultural context and the identity formations it allows for. Textual canons, and literary canons in particular, have attracted the most attention and also generated the most heated debate since the notion of canon in Europe was institutionalized in Early Christianity, when the text of the Bible was composed and translated. However, already at that early stage of textual canonicity harsh debates arose about which texts to include and which to omit. The result was the division of the church in various competing branches from East to West, from North to South of the Christian world, and the emergence of concurrent, slightly different compositions of the Bible in each of these sub-churches, a fact that was not without importance when the Christian church in its missionary ambitions went global. So, from the very beginning, canons have always had a double status: a stable local position and a translocal dynamic.

This double perspective is even more evident today in a world of globalized culture on the one hand, and the emergence of different equally strong decentralized canonizing agencies replacing the central canonizing force of a church or a state: the market, non-verbal media, class, gender, age, educational systems, literary criticism, mass-media etc. Or, on the other hand, if such agencies prevail as with the classical canon of Chinese, Japanese or Indian literatures, to take but some examples, they are challenged by a host of other centralized or decentralized processes of canon formation. In literary studies today the study of world literature frames the debate of this competition and the cultural dynamics it creates.

As the title indicates, The Canonical Debate Today is an intervention in this debate. Originating in a Romanian context but with participation from a few scholars from Europe and the USA, two of which are the co-editors of the volume, the focus is on the crossroads in contemporary culture between the national and the trans-national context and between the textual and the broader media-landscape. Some of the essays fall more to the purely national or textual side with a strong Romanian emphasis and with a reduced globalized perspective, but the majority of the contributions exploit both poles of the oppositions and illustrate how literary standards change by being exposed to a broader context of cultural encounters and transcultural media processes, and by doing so they also move the cultural boundaries.

The volume is subdivided into sections such as ‘Canons and Contexts’, ‘Reshaping Literary Studies’ and ‘Transgressing Literary and Cultural Boundaries.’ As can be seen from those headings the main focus across the contributions is contextualization and transformation. Under the umbrella of contextualization, topics such as evaluation, institutions, curricula and theoretical paradigms are discussed, whereas the perspective of transformation points to issues such as transfer of tradition, re-conceptualization of literature and new notions of comparative studies.

The volume as a whole addresses important topics in today's literary and cultural studies and circumscribes the field by pointing to new ways to go. Although it mostly registers what is on the agenda today but hardly adds new items to be discussed, it provides the reader with concrete and detailed discussions and a useful overview of the field.