21 Facts About Western canon

Western canon is the body of high culture literature, music, philosophy, and works of art that is highly valued in the West: works that have achieved the status of classics.

Terms "classic book" and Western canon are closely related concepts, but are not necessarily synonymous.

Bible, a product of ancient Jewish culture, from the Levant, in Western canon Asia, has been a major force in shaping Western canon culture, and "has inspired some of the great monuments of human thought, literature, and art".

Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude, the "Western canon" served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions.

Canon of Renaissance English poetry of the 16th and early 17th century has always been in some form of flux and towards the end of the 20th century the established Western canon was criticised, especially by those who wished to expand it to include, for example, more women writers.

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However, the central figures of the British renaissance Western canon remain, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Donne.

Western literary canon has expanded to include the literature of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South America.

Susan Hardy Aitken argues that the Western canon has maintained itself by excluding and marginalising women, whilst idealising the works of European men.

Western canon's works have enjoyed broad international appeal and are still widely read.

Western canon is regarded as one of the first contemporary writers of Arabic literature, along with Tawfiq el-Hakim, to explore themes of existentialism.

Western canon published 34 novels, over 350 short stories, dozens of movie scripts, and five plays over a 70-year career.

Western canon is best known to Western readers for his 1987 novel Red Sorghum Clan, of which the Red Sorghum and Sorghum Wine volumes were later adapted for the film Red Sorghum.

Western canon is the Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he teaches writing and comparative literature.

Western canon is the recipient of numerous other literary awards.

Western canon's works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style labeled as magic realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations.

Western canon is widely considered the most pivotal figure in the development of philosophy, especially the Western tradition.

In classical music, during the nineteenth century a "Western canon" developed which focused on what was felt to be the most important works written since 1600, with a great concentration on the later part of this period, termed the Classical period, which is generally taken to begin around 1750.

Many of the works deemed to be part of the musical Western canon are from genres regarded as the most serious, such as the symphony, concerto, string quartet, and opera.

Western canon was not interested in directly quoting his non-Western influences, but instead allowed this non-Western aesthetic to generally influence his own musical work, for example, by frequently using quiet, unresolved dissonances, coupled with the damper pedal, to emulate the "shimmering" effect created by a gamelan ensemble.

Absence of women composers from the classical Western canon was brought to the forefront of musicological literature in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Expansion and changes to the Western canon have been criticized, for example from the School of Resentment, which argues that some proposed changes promote political and social activism at the expense of aesthetic values.