Cultural Capital

An enlarged edition to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of John Guillory’s formative text on the literary canon.

Since its publication in 1993, John Guillory’s Cultural Capital has been a signal text for understanding the codification and uses of the literary canon. Cultural Capital reconsiders the social basis for aesthetic judgment and exposes the unequal distribution of symbolic and literary knowledge on which “culture” had long been based. Drawing from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, Guillory argues that canon formation must be understood less as a question of the representation of social groups than as a question of the distribution of “cultural capital” in the schools, which regulate access to literacy, to the practices of reading and writing.

Now, as the “crisis of the canon” has evolved into the “crisis of humanities,” Guillory’s groundbreaking, incisive work has never been more relevant and urgent. As scholar and critic Merve Emre writes in her introduction to this new edition: “Exclusion, selection, reflection, representation—these are the terms on which the canon wars of the last century were fought, and the terms that continue to inform debates about, for instance, decolonizing the curriculum and the rhetoric of antiracist pedagogy.”