All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home.

Tradition is not only bending down, or process of benign transmission. It is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration in which the price is literary survival or canonical inclusion.

Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket

The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.

Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes