Sobre cânones

To understand how a canon is formed and how it can be socially useful, we might look to another kind of canonisation, that of individual men and women. The earliest and most durable saints were not created by the Pope: they were canonised by a process in which church and people somehow shared. Similarly, it is an obscure collaboration between the clerisy and the people that has canonised the great writers.
Consider the most striking literary canonisation of our times. Jane Austen has always been esteemed, and FR Leavis sanctified her as one of the bearers of the "great tradition," a sort of doctor of his secular church. But in the past 15 years she has turned into the English novelist, an inescapable part of the public consciousness, more universally present than any other writer bar Shakespeare. Some people think she owes her current prominence to popular fantasies of tight breeches and bosoms heaving beneath empire-line dresses. This does not seem likely: if that is what people want, they can get it more readily from Georgette Heyer. Another view is that she has benefited from nostalgia for a safer, quieter and more decorous world; but the idea that the world of her novels is cosy and comfortable can hardly survive the reading of them. Most of her modern popularity is the result of her actual merits, and in a broad sense the highbrows and the lower-middlebrows are admiring the same things: well-made plots, perceptive depiction of character and the acute study of social interaction. It is a genuine popular canonisation. Or take Larkin, again, the last poet to have entered naturally into the general consciousness: people came to find that his words, his lines, his distinctive way of seeing and feeling had become part of the furniture of their minds, part of the common inheritance.

Trecho de "Do We Need a Literary Canon?", de Richard Jenkyns
(DBL)