SOURCE: "Making and Rethinking the Canon: General Introduction and the Case of Millenium Hall," in Modern language Studies, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, Winter, 1988, p. 3.

In the excerpt below, Rabb argues for inclusion of Scott's Millenium Hall in the canon of eighteenth-century literature.

One of the most famous literary representations of a library—one that serves as a scene of dispute over traditional literary hierarchies—occurs in Jonathan Swift's Battle of the Books. In Swift's apt metaphor for the processes by which works from the past endure the changes wrought by time, the stately "treasure house of literature" is also a field of war. Recent commentators on the canon speak of the "continuous selection and reselection" that accounts for changes among the lists of the "great."¹ Swift's fable dramatizes the hostility, conflict, and sometimes personal pique that contribute to the establishment of traditions and canons. Artificial standards, as opposed to...