#  ClasPhil 299: Writers, Readers, Canons: Studies in Premodern Authorship 

 





 Semester:   Spring 

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 Year offered:  2025 

 

 

 

This course examines literary canons, their formation over time, and the politics of canonicity, with case studies from classical antiquity, the middle ages, and the early modern period. How do models of authorship from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries differ from premodern assumptions about literary authority? How do writers construct their own canonicity? How do readers participate in the processes of canonization? Possible case studies include pseudepigrapha, translations, biographies, anonymous texts, commentaries, copies, and imitations. What can this history tell about the cultural processes of canon formation in the premodern era?

Also offered as English 291w.