648 American Literature
Subject of one brief paragraph; three sentences are given over to a harsh judgment of Robinson Jeffers; names of writers such as Wright Morris and Kenneth Rexroth are mentioned only in passing. Had it not been for N. Scott Momaday’s chapter on “The Native Voice,” the list of slights and omissions would be far longer.
Notwithstanding those omissions and the editors failure (as Carafiol puts it) “to rethink mimesis, to develop new terms for the relationship of literature and life” (p. 629). The CLHUS moves in the right direction by at least trying to achieve representation for diverse interests and points of view. Literature grows out of human diversity and is, as Robert Weimann has noted, process. Canon-formation is also a process, and Regionalism can be a vital part of it. But no inexorable law decrees that Regionalism will be a part of the process. Indeed, whenever canons are revalued, Regionalism is the element most likely to be neglected or ignored. What are the other elements of the process? And why is Regionalism usually the forgotten factor? However obvious, the answers need to be stated, for if they remain unsaid, they are more easily overlooked.
Those who begin the process include authors, editors, and publishers. Authors may write some fine books but then, by attacking critics and reviewers and by following their early achievement with inferior work, they may destroy their changes of being included in the canon. Similarly, editors and publishers can promote their authors with more or less enthusiasm. Next, reviewers either recommend or damn a book, and book clubs and booksellers buy it depending on whether they think it will and should sell. Of course, they cannot praise or sell books they have never heard about- a natural law that dooms many good small-press authors to an undeserved obscurity. Readers and librarians begin to cast their votes by buying or ignoring whatever is in print. Now enter the awards committees to select the year’s best- followed by critics and their slower colleagues, the literary historians, also engaged in picking the top ten or top hundred.
Others play a less direct part in formulating the canon. Teach-
Structure and Society in Literary History (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1977), p. 178