Canon, Classics, Tradition: Demarcation Of The Terms

Abstract The canon is a concept with a long history. The religious canon was eventually re-established on secular grounds, where it was comprehended in the categories of official literary (general) and personal (individual) canons, educational canon (reading lists) being correlated to the concept of tradition (canon as selective tradition) and the classics (canon as synchronicity, the classics as diachronicity). These aspects have different features in each national literature, particularly in Ukrainian literature. The necessity of standards and hierarchical classifications remains important after postmodernism, when new concepts, such as corps, collection, postcanon, succeed or keep up with the concept of the canon.