Opening with Salih’s Season of Migration, the chapter uses an imaginary library devoid of Arabic books to question Arabic’s place in world literature. It rejects two temptations – adding Arabic as a simple supplement or isolating it as exceptional – and proposes modern Arabic literature as a field that reshapes questions of time, language, geography, and media. Surveying scholarship and canon formation, the editors trace and critique Nahda-origin periodizations, fuṣḥā/ʿāmmiyya binaries, nationalist gatekeeping, and regional frames such as Mashriq, Maghrib, Gulf, and exile. The volume’s four sections examine shifting temporalities, contested linguistic registers and translation, transnational geographies, and media histories from print to poetry and the novel. A final provocation reads Ahmed Naji’s prison library to ask why Arabic literature matters now, foregrounding contemporary reading, translation, and experimentation against state-sanctioned canons. Across case studies, the Companion offers methods and close readings that unsettle inherited categories while opening future paths for studying modern Arabic literature.

This chapter considers constructions of the Argentine operatic canon in the years immediately preceding the First World War, focusing on Mascagni’s Isabeau. Premiered at Buenos Aires’s Teatro Coliseo in June 1911, the reception of Isabeau outlined competing efforts by critics and managements to shape a specifically Italian-Argentine operatic canon: one that could stand in for local compositions while moving away from the conventions of Cavalleria and Pagliacci. These ambitions were also shaped by concerns over the integration of Italian immigrants, in spite of the enduring success of many Italian operas and critical scepticism that surrounded more recent premieres of Wagner and Strauss. From an Italian perspective, meanwhile, Isabeau’s foreign profile intersected with broader questions of citizenship, nationhood and affective belonging that played out within both political and musicological discussions during a period when dual citizenship was legally impossible. Ultimately, the nationalist drives at work during the 1910s influenced the operatic canons we still draw on today, I argue, affecting critical attitudes towards non-Italian and emigrant composers alike.

This chapter offers a history of critical and theoretical writing about the literature of Southern California. Docherty argues that the origin point for LA literary criticism is not, as often supposed, Edmund Wilson’s The Boys in the Back Room (1941) but USC MA student Margaret Climie’s 1925 thesis. Early critical responses to LA’s literature, including those of Climie, Wilson, and Franklin Walker, at least acknowledged that literature existed in Southern California, but largely dismissed its quality. Docherty identifies David Fine as the critic who embodied LA literary studies’ coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s, but argues that Fine contoured an LA canon subject to certain limitations of form, period, and social perspective. Since the turn of the millennium, the chapter shows, increasing numbers of scholars have offered multiethnic and multiformal critical approaches to LA writing commensurate with the kaleidoscopic diversity of the city’s contemporary literature and indeed the city itself.

This chapter examines Spanish music during the interwar period (1918−39), a stage that coincides with the final two decades of the so-called Silver Age. It highlights the plurality of musical languages used to represent Spain’s evolving – and never fully agreed upon – national identity, with stylistic approaches ranging from late Romanticism to Neopopularism and Neoclassicism as predominant trends. Additionally, this chapter considers the extent to which the tense political climate and the debates between tradition and modernity also influenced repertoire programming, the activities of musical institutions, and the work of performers. Finally, the study explores the roles and spaces occupied by music during the Spanish Civil War and offers a perspective on Republican exile, aiming to reconstruct the trajectories of those musicians who were persecuted under Franco’s regime.

This chapter establishes the spirituals as the bedrock of African American poetry to characterize the tradition as inherently innovative from its origins to the present. It challenges the standard claim that African American poetry begins with texts written by enslaved persons reflecting familiarity with canonical British poetry. In this approach, criticism has generally considered African American poetry in dialogue with the mainstream canon, whether emulating or criticizing its values. Privileging written texts in conventional forms has resulted in devaluing poetry reflecting characteristics such as orality, performance, anonymity, and communal collaboration. It also results in wide acceptance of an African American poetry canon that historically has overlooked the innovative nature of this genre from its origins and an ensuing tradition of avant-garde poetry. From this biased perspective, the spirituals have been overlooked as the genesis of African American poetry, even though that is their rightful place. Viewing the spirituals as the true foundation of this tradition implies shifting some assumptions not just about these poems, but about the place and meaning of originality.

The Conclusion begins by setting the poetic bilingualisms treated in this book alongside the kinds of everyday bilingualism overheard on the streets of any city, from antiquity to the present day, in which two or more cultures meet, clash, and coalesce. There too, inequalities of language status will often be in play; but the inequalities explored here are negotiated in a distinctive way across time, and between ‘older’ and ‘younger’ literary languages or codes. Issues of education and of access to the so-called learned tongues are reviewed; attention is drawn to the sometimes oppressive effect of the word ‘the’ in monolithic master narratives of ‘the’ classical tradition. In retrospect, the book is argued to have been less about achieved classicism than about classicism as process, about a plurality of classical traditions generated anew by every cross-linguistic and transcultural event mobilized by every poet and every reader. Things end with a closural – but also open-ended – catalogue of some of the book’s recurrent questions, preoccupations, themes, and tropes.

A preoccupation with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach was one of the constants in the lives of the Mendelssohn family, especially Fanny and Felix. Bach was one of the few composers who were considered exemplary in the Mendelssohn family. The special chorale and fugue-orientated training with Zelter, their membership of the Singakademie and the cultivation of Bach among their family and friends make it clear in which traditions the siblings Fanny and Felix grew up and undertook their first musical steps and expressions. Bach’s works are always present in the musical performances of both of them. In Fanny’s ’Sunday musicales’, works by Bach were just as much a part of the repertoire as in the concerts that Felix conducted or played on the piano or organ. Their lifelong engagement with Bach’s music is reflected in the compositions of Fanny and Felix and includes details of content, form and compositional technique.

Nowadays Beethoven’s canonic status is taken for granted, but in the 1820s as the Mendelssohns were coming of age, his music was still controversial, and their advocacy of it was something that set them apart from many contemporaries. In their roles as composers, performers, and promoters of music, both Felix Mendelssohn and Fanny Hensel would play a fundamental part in the evolving story of early nineteenth-century Beethoven reception. Moreover, their activities intersected with some of the other leading figures in the nineteenth-century canonisation of Beethoven in ways that shed light on the already contested legacy of their forebear. Equally, the influence of Beethoven on Hensel and Mendelssohn has often been misunderstood, commonly being viewed through later 19th-century anxieties and ideologies that remain extraneous to their world. In short, their relationship with Beethoven is crucial for understanding their own music – and historically was no less crucial for understanding Beethoven’s.

This section explains how 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John became attributed to John, the son of Zebedee, and how they were folded into the biblical canon.

This chapter begins its discussion of Australian poetry in the decades immediately following World War II, post-Ern Malley hoax. It identifies the impulse in major poets of this time to establish a canon of Australian poetry that reinforced a strong sense of settler identity. The chapter reflects upon this expansionary period of Australian literary culture, as evidenced by the growth of Australian publishers, literary magazines, government support for the arts, professional networks, and forums for the discussion of poetry. It considers canon-building manoeuvres in light of a deep divide between conservative and left-wing viewpoints. The role of Douglas Stewart and Beatrice Davis, and Angus & Robertson’s Australian Poets Series, is detailed. The chapter also describes the expansion of Australian literary studies as underpinned by the growth of tertiary education. It discusses how a number of poets assumed elevated university positions, encouraging scholarly accounts and criticism of poetry. Lastly, the chapter concludes that the advent of Oodgeroo’s work presented a formidable challenge to this mid century envisioning of a national canon.

This chapter synthesises empirical methodology with detailed contextual analysis to reflect on the ways in which anthologies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century constructed or de-prioritised national, canonical and generational frames. Noting previous interpretative frameworks such as ‘new lyricism’, this chapter argues that a number of anthologies during this era reflected an ethical turn in Australian poetry and emerged out of or postulated literary communities and networks. The chapter includes an analysis of the two Best Australian anthology series and an analysis of anthologies with canonical impetus. Lastly, it considers the shift in definitional terms from the ‘modern’, ‘new’ or ‘now’ to the ‘contemporary’, as well as forms of discontent with such a term.

The chapter provides an overview situating the literatures produced or circulated in Britain and the racialized, classed, and gendered imaginaries of empire. English literature was informed by imperial concerns and anti-capitalist critique alike since the sixteenth century, even as England was a minor player among European imperial powers. Contemporary scholarship, while attending to marginalized authors, such as women, immigrants, minorities, and the working class, demonstrates that diverse literature, prose especially, but also drama and verse, were shaped by expanding trade, global markets, territorial appropriations, military conquests, human emigration, and cultural contact. A mix of ideologies spawned in the nineteenth century to rationalize British presence as not only inevitable but beneficial for the colonized; for colonized intellectuals, on the other hand, literature fostered alternative visions of resistance. Diasporic writers in twentieth-century Britain introduced readers to the vocabulary and memory of colonized lands. The chapter contends that many themes of contemporary culture are not unique to the present but variations of older, far-flung contests. Literature, in its ability to articulate shifts in perception, sensibilities, and relations before such changes are actualized, is an indispensable site of analysis and study.

The papacy played a key role in establishing the canon of the Bible for the West.

Debussy composed three of his planned Six Sonatas for Various Instruments between 1915 and 1917 before his death in 1918. In 2018, composers from across Europe and North America were invited to write music for the instrumentation of these three incomplete sonatas from Debussy’s grand project, for a concert to be held at the University of Glasgow Memorial Chapel. As a result, several original works were performed by the Chamber Group of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under the direction of Jon Hargreaves, alongside the completed Debussy sonatas.

This chapter presents the reflections of several of these composers, exploring how they confronted the specific question of Debussy’s influence and legacy, as well as trickier questions that arise from attempts to memorialise canonical precursors through contemporary creative practice. In what ways might Debussy’s music live on through the widely diverse imaginations of twenty-first-century composers?

The last musicologist to see the original canon-pictures was apparently Eusebius Mandyczewski, who says: ‘At Eisenstadt [the Esterházy family’s principal residence] there are still [1891] preserved Haydn’s presentation canons – as copies – in slender wooden frames, those that he hung on the walls of his room.’ Mandyczewski, a Haydn authority, recognised that the hand in the canon-pictures was not the composer’s, strengthening a claim made in 1811 by Johann Elßler, Haydn’s servant and copyist, that he had copied their music directly from autographs. Mandyczewski’s observation that the frames were ‘slender’ suggests that Haydn adopted a style of framing favoured by collectors of prints, which the composer would have seen in London and which was much imitated in Germany in the later eighteenth century.

Patrick Prétot comments on the individual parts of which the celebration of the Eucharist consists. For that, he takes as his point of departure the script of the Order of Mass, which is used in the Roman Catholic Church but which shows many commonalities with other liturgical and ecclesial traditions.