Reading the canon : literary history in the 21st century Introduction: The practices of reading and the need for literary value Philipp Löffler Literary history and the problem of periodization Clemens Spahr Singularity and the literary market Günter Leypoldt Literary value and the question of generic change Michael Basseler Shakespeares complete works : canonization completion and collection in the 21st century Peter Paul Schnierer The uses of Emerson : transcendentalism transnationalism and the New Americanists Johannes Volz Edgar Allan Poe and the rise of detective fiction Heiko Jakubzik Canon fodder : Thomas Pynchon and the invention of postmodernism Sascha Pöhlmann Sherman Alexie and the uses of Native American literature Franziska Schmid African American literature canonization and the Nobel Prize : German and American perspectives on Toni Morrison Katharina Gerund Canon and carnival : challenging hierarchies in Zadie Smiths NW Caroline Lusin New canons in the classroom : teaching Black British writing Jan Rupp The great unread : the shadow canon of Indian writing in English Dirk Wiemann John Neal and the problem of Romanticism Stefanie Schäfer Only in the chattel records : obscurity historiography and Frederick Douglass The heroic slave Karin Höpker Charismatic authorship : Walter Scott William Wordsworth and the nineteenth century construction of Romantic canonicity Tim Sommer No longer the text book of any generation : Stover at Yale and the non canonical Sophie Spieler Highbrow Middlebrow Broadbrow J. B. Priestley and cultural re education in postwar Germany Kirsten Hertel Canonizing youth in Mark Ravenhills plays Ellen Redling