(CANON) AGGREGATE

Format

We've touched upon it a number of times already, but here, in Chapter Four, we perform our "deep dive" into format in an attempt to examine which formats are most popular, which authors rule their respective formats, and how format has changed with respect to literary era. (For more information on history, see Chapter Two, and for more information on Authors, see Chapter Three).

The Format Wars

The most popular format within the confines of the AC is, far and away, the novel. Accounting for 250 of 532 works (46.99%) within the AC, the novel also includes 2373CR (45.51%) as well, placing it firmly at the the top of our list. While we shall stop short of attempting to explain exactly why, or how, the novel is such a popular format, it is worth noting that we are presented with something of a "chicken or egg" problem. As demonstrated in Chapter Two, the canon began to proliferate after Shakespeare, but it didn't truly take off until the 19th century. This era coincides with the rise of the novel (approximately 100 years previous - some sources pin the first novel on Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, while others begin the timeline with Cervantes' Don Quixote), and we are left to ponder: was the novel simply in the right place at the right time? That is to ask, if another format had begun to become popular around the industrial revolution, would that format instead dominate the canon today? Or, we may discuss the inverse: is the novel itself due credit for popularizing literature? Most scholars would likely agree on the former rather than the latter, but our data offers no suggestion one way or another. Whatever the case, the novel absolutely dominates the AC to an extent that no other format can come close to matching. In addition, if we include statistics for the novella (defined as a short, easily-digestable version of the novel) and classify them also as novels (they are separated for the above statistics and in our graphs), then the share of the AC grows to 52.81% of all works (250 novels, 76 novellas).

The most popular novel, then, is also the most popular text in all the AC, specifically, Austen's Pride and Prejudice. The novel also accounts for 40% of the top ten on the AC (Austen, C. Bronte's Jane Eyre, Orwell's 1984, and E. Bronte's Wuthering Heights). Novels are also consistently classified as Fiction (both on the AC and not), meaning the most popular novels are also the most popular of all fiction literature. There is little else to add, other than to say that the novel rules over the AC in all but one aspect: the aforementioned longevity, which sees it rise in only the last two hundred years or so. Interestingly, this is also, as previously stated, also the time period in which the largest number of texts were added to the AC.

The second-most popular genre, according to our statistics, is the drama, with 64 works (12.03% of total). Once again, we encounter the canon-warping presence of the Bard here; as primarily an author and driver of drama, without his texts to bolster its statistics, drama would account for 35 works (6.73% of total, less Shakespeare). This also means that Shakespeare single-handedly doubled the output of drama accepted into the AC. The highest ranking dramatic text is Hamlet, followed by Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello, and King Lear. The most popular non-Shakespearean dramas are Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, Sophocles' Antigone, and Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. As you might surmise, drama saw its heyday twice, once during ancient Classical era Greece and again during Elizabethan England, but it stands alongside verse (specifically, epic poetry) as one of the first formats in literature. The oldest drama on the AC is Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound (479BC, though authorship of this particular text is disputed), while the newest is almost sixty years old: Reginald Rose's Twelve Angry Men (1964). This gives the drama almost 2500 years of history; the only format with a longer history is the epic poem, personified by Gilgamesh and running all the way to the modern era with Nabakov's Pale Fire, giving it almost 4000 years of longevity. One unique piece of dramatic literature worth mentioning specifically is Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt (91 overall, 18CR), which holds the simultaneous formats of drama and verse. It is the only drama to hold a format in more than one category.

Rounding out the top three is verse, a format which includes modern poetry, epic poetry, and song. The oldest known format, as previously stated, beginning with Gilgamesh (~2100BC), verse maintains a strong presence on the AC mostly through the influence of UR. Though mostly out of vogue with popular readers in today's climate, poetry nonetheless succeeds in other forms (notably through song) in ways that traditional, "literary" poetry might not, at least commercially speaking. The most popular poet on the AC is Geoffrey Chaucer (Canterbury Tales), followed closely by Dante Alighieri (The Divine Comedy), Homer (The Odyssey), John Milton (Paradise Lost), Homer again (The Iliad), and Ovid (Metamorphoses). You'll no doubt note that the top of the verse list is dominated by epic-length poetry, and it isn't until we reach the sixth entry, Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads (27CR) that we begin to see something more resembling modern tastes in verse, even if they are considered lengthy in comparison. From here, we move back into epics with Virgil's Aeneid, and finally into texts which are commonly found in the Verse chart, and in few others: poetry anthologies. Lyrical Ballads was the first such text on this list, but other authors, like Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Keats' Collected Works, and Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil, amongst numerous others, also fit the category. The highest-scoring "stand-alone, non-epic" poem is T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, followed by the same author's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Poe's The Raven, Carroll's Jabberwocky, Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est, Wordsworth's Prelude, and Rosetti's Goblin Market. The newest verse work on the AC is Vladimir Nabakov's Pale Fire (1962), and the format accounts for 45 individual works, or 8.46% of total.

The next most popular formats, in order, are the novella (7.00%), and the treatise (6.88%). As previously discussed, the novella could reasonably be considered part of the novel data, although it is separated in this list for clarity's sake. Additionally, the treatise, a format which includes essays, political writings, scientific writings, and diaries/journals, is mostly nonfiction in nature. It and the biography/autobiography formats account for almost all of the nonfiction on the AC. The most popular novella is also the second-most popular text overall (Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby), while the most popular treatise is a tie between Thoreau's Walden and Plato's Republic.

Following these two genres are a series of extremely small genres, which each defied classification, and offered only a few texts respectively. In descending order of textual contribution, they are: Short Stories (20), Autobiographies (12), Stand-Alone Essays (3), Theological Texts (3), Political Documents (3), Biographies (1), Dialogues (1), and Graphic Novels (1). The most popular Short Story was Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher (17CR), followed by Kafka's Metamorphosis (17CR) and Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (16CR). The most popular autobiography was St. Augustine's Confessions (24CR), followed by The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, each with 13CR. There are only three stand-alone essays on the AC (separated from treatises by length and depth): Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" (15CR), Emerson's "Self-Reliance" (11CR), and Erasmus' "The Praise of Folly" (2CR). There are only three theological texts, as well. They are: The King James Bible (28CR), The Qu'ran (4CR), and Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed (2CR). This mirrors the three political documents on the AC, which are: The Declaration of Independence (14CR), The US Constitution (7CR), and the Federalist Papers/Articles of Confederation (6CR). I was surprised at this turn of events; I fully expected the Magna Carta to appear, considering the British presence at the top of the list, but it was not to be. I suspect, as noted previously, because the AC has been subsumed by American authors, especially in recent times, as it has grown in size. There is only one biography on the list, Norman Mailer's true crime text The Executioner's Song (1CR), based on the life of Gary Gilmore. The single dialogue that appears is Plato's Phaedrus (10CR), representing the largest CR for the smallest format, and, finally, a single graphic novel jumps onto the AC: Alan Moore's Watchmen (1CR). This final inclusion might represent the reluctance of canon-makers to accept newer formats into the canon, a tradition I suspect (hope) will change with time.

The Novel

Interestingly, as illustrated on the chart to the right, only half of the top six novels are from authors that produced more than one text on the AC (Austen (5), Orwell (3), and Hawthorne (7)). Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, and J. D. Salinger's texts are all one-offs. Whether this is because these texts are, in addition to being each author's magnum opus, eclipsing of anything else that author wrote, or, simply because nothing else from that author is deemed worthy of inclusion is a question we cannot answer. The gap in CR amongst these top novels is rather thin, with only 18CR separating first from sixth. This is not, however, to take anything away from Austen's seminal work; it was the only text to reach the threshold of 60CR, when only three novels in the entire AC reached 50CR. This, again, does not necessarily indicate that Austen is "10% better" than the authors she eclipsed, but rather that popular opinion about Pride and Prejudice is rather uniform (again, an unusual characteristic when discussing literature, especially the canon, in which consensus is quite difficult to come by).

The leader amongst UR within this group is perhaps surprising, as Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre edges Austen by 2UR. Both novels are domestic fiction, set in the mid-19th century, and deal with manners (a common theme amongst popular novels of the day, at least according to the AC), though Bronte, for whatever reason, recieves additional plaudits from the university. This may simply be because she isn't Austen, as the act of avoiding assigning texts that have recieved the reputation of "overused" or "overplayed" is not unusual amongst professors. If this was the case, perhaps we wouldn't see the vast majority of the AC concentrated on the top texts, while amost two hundred additional entries are left to languish with only a single UR.

It is fascinating that neither of the two "first" novels (Cervantes or Defoe) reached the pinnacle of the AC. In many cases, genre originators, or, at the very least, trailblazers, are often enshrined as the primary, seminal example of the format or genre. Orwell, for example, may be widely credited for popularizing dystopia (a particular subgenre of speculative fiction, a genre which includes everything from pulp (Lovecraft) to high fantasy (Tolkien) to sci-fi (Bradbury). The novel, for what it's worth, seems to be "too big a beast" to give all credit to the originators, and although both appear on the AC, at respectively high positions, they cannot compete with the top CR herein.

The chart at right illustrates the six most popular texts within the format, ranked on a podium. The larger number is indicative of the CR a text recieved, while the slashed number (xx/yy) is an indication of a text's GR and UR rate, respectively. A version of all charts is available in .pdf.

Drama

You'll no doubt note that the chart at right is absent Shakespeare. The reason is simple, and by now rather obvious; Shakespeare would take up the entire chart (and then some). Instead, this chart is designed to shine a spotlight on some of the non-Shakespearean authors represented on the AC.

Shakespeare's closest rival in drama, in a (very) distant second, is the ancient Greek playwright Sophocles, who has five texts appear on the AC, and two are represented within the top six non-Shakespearean dramas. This is quite a feat, and his other entries Oedipus at Colonus and Philoctetes, aren't particularly far behind. Other authors on this chart are Arthur Miller, who, in addition to Death of a Salesman also contributed The Crucible; Samuel Beckett (whose only text on the AC is presented here); Henrik Ibsen (who also contributed Peer Gynt in addition to A Doll's House); and Oscar Wilde. Wilde's text, The Importance of Being Earnest, isn't even his highest-scoring text on the AC. That honor goes to his gothic novella The Picture of Dorian Grey (23 overall, 37CR). This crossover between formats is somewhat unique to Wilde, as authors of drama, at least on the AC, seem to stick to drama. One could make the argument that Christopher Marlowe (Doctor Faustus), Shakespeare (Sonnets), and Henrik Ibsen (Peer Gynt) belong in the verse format list as well, as these contributions are also written as such, but Wilde stands alone as the only author to produce both high-scoring drama and a high-scoring novel or novella.

The heyday of drama on the AC is split into three distinct time periods (ancient (Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, Aristophanes)), Elizabethan (Shakespeare), and modern (everyone else). In both BC and Shakespearean times, the quality and broadness of dramatic writing was concentrated in only a few individuals, whereas only Tennessee Williams (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie) and the aforementioned Arthur Miller and Henrik Ibsen achieved repeated success from the 19th or 20th centuries. Multiple dramatic authors recieved only one work added to the AC, much to my surprise, including luminaries like Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), Honore De Balzac (The Black Sheep), Jean-Baptiste Racine (The Beggar's Opera), Eugene O'Neill (The Iceman Cometh), George Bernard Shaw (Pygmalion), and Moliere (The Misanthrope).

The chart at right illustrates the six most popular texts within the format, ranked on a podium. The larger number is indicative of the CR a text recieved, while the slashed number (xx/yy) is an indication of a text's GR and UR rate, respectively. A version of all charts is available in .pdf.

Verse

The top verse texts are a "who's who" in terms of the epic poetic form. "Modern" forms of poetry - shorter, with less restrictive rhyme schemes, often smaller in scope and design - didn't begin to appear in earnest until popularized by Wordsworth and Coleridge, whose text Lyrical Ballads is amongst the highest-scoring non-epic poetry on the AC, and, I would argue, sets the precendent for how students and readers envision poetry in the modern era. The number one scoring verse text, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, was originally written as song; today, most would consider it somewhere between "an anthology of short stories" or even "novel." The same is true for all six texts on this chart.

In many cases, the texts you see here are "parts of the whole." It was quite common, for example, while gathering my data, to see both The Divine Comedy and "Inferno," (Part I of The Divine Comedy). For Chaucer, it was "The Wife of Bath's Tale." For Homer, it was The Odyssey (and not The Iliad, which recieved its own separate entry). For Milton, it was "The Fall," and for Ovid, it was a wide array of individual tales spread across class types and reader preferences. All of this is to say that, likely owing to modern reading sensibilities, it is not particularly common for canon makers to include entire tracts of poetic text, and instead prefer individual poetic works. Whether this is to the benefit of the text (allowing more readers to consume the material in smaller parts, thus expanding the audience and therefore the exposure); or detriment (not reading the full text), is a question I leave to the reader. Whenever a single tale/poem/canto from a text was selected, I awarded a GR or UR to the entire text. There have been notable exceptions to this rule (Carroll's "Jabberwocky" and Homer's "Iliad," for example), but those texts were given their own entries on the strength of "too many individual recs to ignore."

For its part, and probably not particularly surprising to anyone within literary studies, poetry and verse enjoys the highest relative UR rating of all formats, scoring higher than drama (the runner-up) and the Short Story (the somewhat surprising third-place finisher, though I suspect this is due to logistical time constraints within the classroom). Considering their relative length, it was quite surprising to see the epics at the top of this list, and of the AC in general. Going in to this project, I expected to see far more poetry than I did; after all, I recognize that interest in the genre is not what it might have once been, but with such short, "bite-size" literary segments, I would have assumed that far more would make their way into the canon. This was, as you can see, not born out, and in fact the opposite proved true, as the longest poetry became the most beloved.

The chart at right illustrates the six most popular texts within the format, ranked on a podium. The larger number is indicative of the CR a text recieved, while the slashed number (xx/yy) is an indication of a text's GR and UR rate, respectively. A version of all charts is available in .pdf.

Novella

The "short novel," cousin to the most popular genre on the AC, the novella hosts a wide variety of authors, texts, ideas, and genres (though, generally, novellas, for the purposes of this project, are considered fiction). Non-fictional texts of equal length were usually given the format of treatise.

With the second overall text on the entire AC, it is likely no surprise that Fitzgerald leads the way here, by quite a wide margin over the runner-up, Oscar Wilde, who also made waves within the format of drama. It is arguable whether or not Fitzgerald's text could be considered a novella or a novel, but more sources described it as the former, and the distinction appears to be both subjective and abitrary.

In third place is another author, who, like Wilde, achieved success in another format; this time, it's Orwell with Animal Farm, after achieving similar success within the novel format with 1984. Rounding out the top six are Voltaire, Stevenson, and Poe. Whereas Gatsby is on the longer side for a novella, both Poe and Stevenson's offerings are so much on the shorter side that they could reasonably be considered "long short stories." The interesting outlier on this list appears to be Voltaire, whose novella Candide is also designed to be philosophical and satirical. The rest of this top six, with the exception of Gatsby, seems to be a haven for short, speculative stories, but Candide stands apart.

The novella seems to be the home for speculative fiction, ghost stories, and the Gothic (outside of the novel, at least). Dickens (A Christmas Carol), James (Turn of the Screw), Kafka (The Trial), Irving (Rip Van Winkle), Wells (The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man), Verne (20K Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth), and Lewis (The Screwtape Letters) all comprise the majority of the novellas found on the AC. Interestingly, aside from spooky stories and speculative fiction, another commonly found genre within the novella format is Children's Literature. I suspect this is due to length, but a partial crossover between the imaginative fiction found within Children's Lit, and that found within speculative fiction, cannot be ignored. Children's Lit novellas making appearances on the AC include Roald Dahl's The BFG, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince, and Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book.

The chart at right illustrates the six most popular texts within the format, ranked on a podium. The larger number is indicative of the CR a text recieved, while the slashed number (xx/yy) is an indication of a text's GR and UR rate, respectively. A version of all charts is available in .pdf.

Treatise

The treatise is a format consisting only of nonfiction entries. Texts that are scientific tracts, political discourse, or otherwise discuss the goings-on of philosophy, science, nature, politics, rhetoric, or other categories ended up in this format. Note that this format does not include shorter, stand-alone essays (the treatise is to the essay as the novel is to the novella), of which there were only three appearing on the AC: Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Emerson's Self-Reliance, and Erasmus' The Praise of Folly. Foundational, formative texts that are likewise nonfiction (or muddled) are not on this chart; you may find those represented on the seventh chart in these tabs, "Theology/Political."

Speaking of theology and political science, those are, far and away, the most popular topics within the treatise format. Scientific discourse is also represented, in the form of Darwin (Origin of Species, biology) Harvey (On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, medicine) Newton (Principia Mathematica, math), Pascal (Pensees, math), Euclid (Elements, chemistry), Kepler (On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres, astronomy) and Sun Tzu (The Art of War, combat). These topics, however, are absolutely dwarfed by the number of philosophical, political, or religious treatises that appear on the AC, including those listed here within the top six. Some landmark foundational texts, including some that are responsible for founding states, movements, political parties, or even entire religions are present. Starting with Aristotle (8 texts), and including satirical takes on politics and passionate speeches regarding its nature (Swift's A Modest Proposal and Milton's Aeropagitica, respectively), treatises on the AC include founding religious documents, including St. Augustine's City of God, Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica, John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, and Martin Luther's The Ninety-Five Theses. Landmark philosophical texts include Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Sartre, and John Stuart Mill. Other philosophers include Machiavelli, Hume, Burke, Hegel, Leibniz, Foucault, Friere, Kierkegaard, Kant, and Rousseau. Politics brings another assortment of luminaries to the table in the form of Plato, Thoreau, Hobbes, Smith, and Locke, amongst others.

No matter which of the three particular tracts these treatises persue - and often, it is a mix of more than one, or even all three simultaneously - this list contains some of the most landmark, sea-changing, history-altering literature ever written. Considering its historical import it is perhaps concerning that it falls so far behind fiction on the AC, but it is not perhaps surprising, as you are likely to find few who read Kant, Kierkegaard, or Newton for leisure - hence, not coincidentally, the relatively high UR/GR ratio.

The chart at right illustrates the six most popular texts within the format, ranked on a podium. The larger number is indicative of the CR a text recieved, while the slashed number (xx/yy) is an indication of a text's GR and UR rate, respectively. A version of all charts is available in .pdf.

Short Story

Short stories, a favorite of the UR (likely because of the pragmatic implications of in-class time restrictions), are a fascinating format to examine. With only twenty representatives on the AC, they appear to be considered less important than other formats, despite their popularity in the educational system. This may be due, at least in part, to the tendency of many of these short stories to appear anthologized, either within a compendium of an author's work, or within a massive, two-hundred dollar text designed to be all-inclusive of literature from, for example, the Romantic period.

The leading short story is Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, in a tie with Kafka's modernist masterpiece The Metamorphosis. Other legendary texts make appearances on this list, in addition to the top six listed at right. Some of these highly-recongizable names include Chopin (The Story of an Hour), Faulkner (A Rose for Emily, Barn Burning), Hemingway (Hills Like White Elephants), Hawthorne (Young Goodman Brown), Walker (Everyday Use), Jackson (The Lottery), Irving (The Legend of Sleepy Hollow), and Bierce (An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge).

The undisputed master of the short story, however, is Edgar Allan Poe. In addition to his text scoring at the top of these ranks, he also adds The Cask of Amontillado within the top six, as well as other additions The Pit and the Pendulum and The Masque of the Red Death, giving him four out of twenty short stories on the entire AC; in other words, fully 20% of all short stories found on the AC belong to Poe. He is to the short story format as Shakespeare is to the drama format. The only other author with multiple short stories on the AC is Faulkner, with two.

Interestingly, most of the authors of short stories on this list are American. Only Kafka and Orwell are non-American AC-ranking short story writers, and each has a more popular text than their short story (for Kafka, The Trial, his novella, is more popular than The Metamorphosis, and for Orwell, Shooting an Elephant is the least popular of this three texts, by a wide margin (1984 and Animal Farm).

The chart at right illustrates the six most popular texts within the format, ranked on a podium. The larger number is indicative of the CR a text recieved, while the slashed number (xx/yy) is an indication of a text's GR and UR rate, respectively. A version of all charts is available in .pdf.

Theology and Politics

This chart combines two of our smallest formats (outside of the singleton formats (graphic novel, biography, and dialogue)), as each only has three representatives total within the AC. These formats, theological documents and political documents, defy the fiction/nonfiction binary. They are, arguably, the most impactful and influential documents in world history, having been adopted into a powerful modern global empire, the world's oldest monotheistic religion, and two of the most popular Abrahamic religions in world history.

We can only guess as to these foundational documents' relative unpopularity amongst texts on the AC. Considering the number of American authors on the canon, as well as the explosion of its popularity around the time the country was founded, make it unsurprising that its founding documents appear here. What is surprising, however, is that they are referenced in such relatively small numbers. The one text that stands out from the rest on this list is the lowest-rated CR text (Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed). This text, referencing Judaism, is less of a foundational one (than, for example, the Torah), and could reasonably be classified alongside the religious treatises. I included it here as it is an attempt to reconcile Jewish theology with Aristotealean rationalism, and therefore could be considered not necessarily a theory or justification, but rather a supporting religious reference text.

There are few texts that hold the level of influence that these do, though I was surprised, during my research, that some of the world's most influential documents did not make an appearance on the AC alongside these. The most surprising omission was the Magna Carta, which I expected to see included due to university political science or history departments. I was likewise surprised at the lack of both famous speeches and legal decisions. Brown v. Board of Education, The Emancipation Proclamation, The Gettysburg Address, Paine's Rights of Man, or the Cyrus Cylinder, perhaps the first known charter of human rights, constructed in 539 (Abel par. 11), were all omitted.

Note here, that much like our verse section, a single chapter or book of the whole was often included, and in those cases the work itself recieved a rec. Popular piecemeal additions included "The Book of Genesis," "The Book of Exodus," "I Kings," "II Kings," "Samuel," "David," "Revelations," a number of individual Federalist Papers, and the Constitution's Bill of Rights and/or Preamble.

The chart at right illustrates the six most popular texts within the format, ranked on a podium. The larger number is indicative of the CR a text recieved, while the slashed number (xx/yy) is an indication of a text's GR and UR rate, respectively. A version of all charts is available in .pdf.

Autobiography

Our final non-singleton format is the autobiography. This format includes twelve works, including some which are slightly fictionalized or otherwise exaggerated versions of individuals' lives. It should be noted here that a number of these texts' status as "autobiographies" was ultimately a judgment call on the part of the editor; a number of texts are autobiographical in nature, utilizing elements from authors' lives or even places or personal names, but are ultimately not considered autobiographies. When fiction overtook fact, the text was categorized as fiction (and, accordingly, novel, novella, or verse); when fact outweighed fiction, the text was an autobiography. In addition to further demonstrating our preference for fiction over nonfiction, the relative unpopularity of these texts shouldn't in any way diminish their importance, though it is also worth pointing out that only a single biographical text (non-autobiographical) made the list; specifically, Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song (401 overall, 1CR), which could rightfully be considered either biography, true crime, or enhanced reality fiction.

The highest-scoring text on this list, by a wide margin, is St. Augustine's (Augustine of Hippo's) Confessions. This is St. Augustine's highest-scoring text on the list, but not his only one; he is also responsible for the treatise entry City of God. Tied for second, with 13CR apeice, are the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass, with Harriet Jacobs' autobiography coming in a close fourth.

The other entries on the list belong to Elie Wiesel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, James Baldwin, Samuel Butler, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Thomas De Quincey, Anne Frank, and Hunter S. Thompson. I would have expected Anne Frank and Hunter S. Thompson to be much higher on the list, but they scored significantly lower than expected. For Anne Frank, I suspect it is the inherent depressing nature of the text that turns off casual readers, and the relative reading level (middle school) which turns away universities. Hunter S. Thompson, on the other hand, may have scored low because of the confusing, frenetic nature of the text; given some of the other works on the AC, it doesn't appear that drug-induced hedonism is necessarily a turn-off to makers of canonical lists.

The chart at right illustrates the six most popular texts within the format, ranked on a podium. The larger number is indicative of the CR a text recieved, while the slashed number (xx/yy) is an indication of a text's GR and UR rate, respectively. A version of all charts is available in .pdf.

Rec Origins

The chart at left demonstrates the same data from our earlier graph as to the dominance of the novel. Whereas our previous graph denoted percentage of canon by works, however, this chart is designed to demonstrate the top six formats by number of recs. The slashed (/) numbers beneath each bar are the number of UR and GR each format generated, respectively, and the large numeral is the CR of each (GR + UR).

As you can see, the gap between novels and other formats grows even more when we account for CR rather than number of works and canon percentage. With more than twice the number of the next highest-scoring format (the drama), novels continue to crush the competition, again, despite having almost 1600 years less time as an extant format. Note that if we remove Shakespeare and his 624 recs from the equation, drama drops all the way from second to fourth, just behind the novella. In addition to demonstrating once again Shakespeare's ground-shifting effect on the AC, it also demonstrates that the novel's superiority over other formats would grow to almost four times that of its next closest competitor, verse.

The origins of the recs demonstrated at left are equally fascinating. Note that short stories are highly favored by universities, being the only format in which UR is higher than GR (and by a factor of almost two). 66% of all short story recs were UR. The treatise was the second-highest scoring format in the university, with a higher total score, but a lower percentage (61%). The third on the podium is verse, with 39%. The novella, coincidentally, had the lowest UR percentage of all the formats identified, at only 20%, while the novel fared little better, at 24%. As previously speculated, this may be due to pragmatic time constraints within the university semester, though it may also indicate a clear pattern of preference amongst professors and curriculum-makers. Whether these are concerted attempts to "move" the canon in a new direction, or the result of tradition and study, is unclear. What is clear, however, is that the primary driver of the canon is the GR (generic rec). This is quite fascinating for a few reasons. First, it indicates that tradition and previous education bear strong results on what individuals consider "most important." Second, it indicates that despite university efforts (or, perhaps, because of those efforts in the past, assuming our queried list-makers attended higher education) individuals find these texts popular regardless of what they may have read in class. Finally, and most importantly, it is fascinating to note that the thing upon which the literary canon has the greatest effect - university education - has, proportionally, the least impact on what readers and consumers of literature deem important and valuable.

This duality is demonstrated visually by the next chart, which highlights the percentage of rec origins between UR and GR. As you can see, GR (generic rec sources) accounted for over 70% - almost three-quarters - of all recs on the AC. UR sources, university-led recs, accounted for only 29%. The highest-scoring author, in terms of raw CR, was, no surprise, Shakespeare (170UR). The rest of the top UR scoring authors (in order to 10), were Virginia Woolf (2), William Faulkner (3), Sophocles (4), Homer (5), James Joyce (6), Herman Melville (7), Dante (8), Toni Morrison (9), and Plato (10). This is in sharp contrast to those authors which scored highest in GR: Shakespeare (1), Austen (2), Dickens (3), Orwell (4), Poe (5), Dostoevsky (6), Steinbeck (7), Hemingway (8), Twain (9), and Fitzgerald (10).

A number of authors tied for the highest percentage of UR to GR, indicating they are loved and pushed at the university level, though canon-makers haven't seen fit to include them. Each of the following authors recieved at least 1UR but 0GR: Soren Kierkegaard, Percy Shelley, Paolo Friere, Isaac Asimov (a major surprise!), Hunter S. Thompson, Francois de La Rochefoucauld, Edmund Husserl, Cormac McCarthy, and Anselm of Canterbury. On the other hand, there were a total of 183 authors whom saw support at the GR level without seeing a single score in UR. Many of these were single GR from only one list, but a number of them scored quite highly without any university support. I suspect that is primarily due to their reading levels being considered too low for collegiate work, but that may not always be the case. Some of these high-scoring GR authors without UR support include Harper Lee, H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, Louisa May Alcott, Alexandre Dumas (another major surprise!), John Bunyan, Marcel Proust, Samuel Richardson, and Francois Rabelais. All recieved at least 10+ GR without a single vote of UR. Other major surprise snubs from university lists included Cheng'en Wu (Journey to the West, 1GR, 0UR), Philip K Dick, Booker T. Washington, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Guanzhong Luo (Romance of the Three Kindgoms, 1GR, 0UR), Arthur C. Clarke, Edmund Burke, Eugene O'Neill, James Baldwin, Elie Wiesel, Jerome K. Jerome, Ann Radcliffe, Sigmund Freud, Emily Dickinson, Salman Rushdie, C. S. Lewis, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. All of these authors recieved at least one GR without recieving a single UR. This I found especially fascinating, as, anecdotally, I can recall reading a number of these authors in my own educational journey, and I'm sure that experience was not unique. What this means, however, is that many university professors assign texts without necessarily considering them part of the canon. This data was also suggested by examining results from opensyllabus.org, though, as noted in Chapter One, that data required significant cleaning to be of use.

University Favorites

As you can see illustrated in the chart at right, the university list top six looks quite different than that of the AC top 6. As a reminder, the top six texts in the AC, according to CR, are Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, Jane Eyre, Canterbury Tales, 1984, and Hamlet. Things shuffle significantly when dealing in UR only, leaving only one text - Chaucer - near the top of the list. He winds up moving up a spot to tie for second with Plato's The Republic, though neither can compete with the new leading text, Dante's Divine Comedy, previously ninth overall. I've mentioned previously that the most-assigned text according to opensyllabus.org (and the most downloaded text on Project Gutenberg's US affiliate) was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. This text is nowhere to be found on this list, suggesting, once again, that assigned texts and UR "canonicity" are two wholly separate metrics. This data point may seem insignificant, but what it suggests is that, despite not necessarily appearing on the AC, texts are being assigned at the university level that reflect pedagogical practices of their various institutions and/or professors.

Although Shakespeare appears on both the CR and UR top lists, the text with which he does changes, from Hamlet in CR to The Tempest in UR. One place behind the Bard is Homer's Odyssey, which was 13th overall in CR, and now ranks 5th. Sixth place sees a three-way tie, between another Shakespeare text (Othello), Conrad's Heart of Darkness (the first time that text or author has appeared at the top of the canon, despite significant literary contributions) and Wordsworth and Coleridge's poetic tour-de-force Lyrical Ballads. Although the Shakespearean texts change from CR to UR, the preference for Shakespearean tragedy remains constant amongst both generic lists and pedagogy.

Other high-scoring UR texts that just missed the cut include Oedipus Rex, Confessions, Jane Eyre, Huckleberry Finn, Macbeth, King Lear, Ulysses, The Iliad, The Prince, Candide, and Mrs. Dalloway.