This concept traces the theoretical evolution of 20th-century literary criticism as a discipline, framed as a recurring "double movement" between canon formation (establishing hierarchical, exclusionary standards of literary value, e.g., T.S. Eliot's theory of tradition and impersonality, F.R. Leavis's "great tradition") and canon critique/decentering (dismantling those hierarchies via feminist, postcolonial, and cultural-studies interventions, e.g., Virginia Woolf, Raymond Williams, Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Stuart Hall). It belongs to the domain of literary theory and criticism, situating the discipline's development within its institutional ties to pedagogy, governance, and cultural authority, and showing how successive theoretical frameworks (formalism, psychological criticism, moral criticism, cultural materialism, postcolonial theory, subcultural/semiotic analysis) each redefine what constitutes literary value and who has authority to determine it.
This concept traces the theoretical evolution of 20th-century literary criticism as a discipline, framed as a recurring "double movement" between canon formation (establishing hierarchical, exclusion…