Canon et Anti-Canon (I): L’Héritage d’Aristote.

Western culture and literature have been moulded, in their main aesthetic conceptions and creative practices, by Aristotle’s principles. Starting from his seminal text Poetics, ancient, medieval, and modern (from Renaissance to the twentieth century) aesthetics, poetics, rhetorical and grammatical theories have reiterated, amplified, adapted and reshaped the concepts of imitation (mimesis), subject (mythos), meaning (dianoia), order (taxis), unity of the whole and harmony of the parts, etc. On this basis, they demanded that literary works should have - as a prerequisite of aesthetic value and artistic success - a structure, a unitary composition, a centred form, a logos, a cogito, a synopsis or any other formal pattern. This brought about the exclusion from the canon of the works failing to complain with these criteria. In this paper I retrace the Aristotelian tradition, from Horace, Cicero and Quintilian to Beda and Dante, from Minturno and Scaliger to du Bellay and Boileau, from Sydney, Dryden and Pope to Mathew Arnold, the Chicago School and Northrop Frye. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]