Considerations for ‘Goblin Market’ as Canonical Anonymous College

Literary theorist Terry Eagleton once remarked in 1983 ‘Literature is any kind of writing which for some reason or another somebody values highly’. The literary Canon is comprised of a selection of the ‘classics’, which all fit the canonical criteria established by critics to determine the value and thus the eligibility of set works to entry into the canon. Rossetti’s poem ‘Goblin Market’ seems timeless in its ability to consistently merit special attention from critics and readers alike through the diversity of possible interpretations that can be deduced from its multivalent content. Arguably, it is this critical interest in Rossetti’s poetry, which particularly swelled in the final decades of the twentieth century, largely impelled by the emergence of feminist criticism, alongside the timeless issues that her work addresses, that places Rossetti beside some of the greatest authors in literature.

In their book ‘Ways of Reading’, Montgomery et al. concur that the literary works of major distinction and thereby those considered to be canonical are distinguished by their ‘complexity of’ ‘language’ and ‘ideas’, which, interwoven, can be seen to constitute the ‘aesthetic unity’ of a text. Given that complexity is a ‘synonym of...