Jonathan Brody Kramnick's book examines the formation of the English canon over the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century. Kramnick details how the idea of literary tradition emerged out of a prolonged engagement with the institutions of cultural modernity, from the public sphere and national identity to capitalism and the print market. Looking at a wide variety of eighteenth-century critical writing, he analyses the tensions that inhabited the categories of national literature and public culture at the moment of their emergence.

Review of the hardback:‘While the rise of the English canon has been a topic of continuous and fraught interest over the past couple of decades Jonathan Kramnick offers the most coherent and detailed discussion of what is arguably its crucial historical moment: the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Kramnick’s discussion of how Shakespeare and Spenser became the first English ‘classics’ will itself become classic. Making the English Canon is not simply a monograph on eighteenth-century literary aesthetics, it is a singularly powerful and authoritative contribution to perhaps the most important discussion going on in the literary humanities today.’

Terry Castle