OED Q: "canon" as "accepted body of works"?

[Shapiro, Fred]

Joel,

Yes, you missed it.  See below.

Fred





 a.Literary Criticism. A body of literary works traditionally regarded as the most important, significant, and worthy of study; those works of esp. Western literature considered to be established as being of the highest quality and most enduring value; the classics (now freq. in the canon). Also (usu. with qualifying word): such a body of literature in a particular language, or from a particular culture, period, genre, etc.

1929   Amer. Lit. 1 95   Those who read bits of Mather with pleasure will continue to feel that those bits cannot be excluded from the canon of literature until much excellent English ‘utilitarian’ prose is similarly excluded.
1953   W. R. Trask tr. E. R. Curtius European Lit. & Lat. Middle Ages xiv. 264   Of the modern literatures, the Italian was the first to develop a canon.
1989   Times Lit. Suppl. 7 July 739   My Secret History‥alludes to half the modernist canon, from Eliot to Hemingway to Henry Miller.
1999   N.Y. Rev. Bks. 4 Nov. 29/2   The canon was under attack from feminists and social historians who saw it as the preserve of male and bourgeois dominance.
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 b. In extended use (esp. with reference to art or music): a body of works, etc., considered to be established as the most important or significant in a particular field. Freq. with qualifying word.

1977   R. Macksey in Compar. Lit. 92 1188   The author concentrates on six major works in the operatic canon, masterpieces by two towering figures in the history of Western music.
1985   Washington Post 5 July x12/1   What looks like spaghetti Bolognese and keeps fresh on the shelf for 50 years? Japanese plastic food, the real-as-life models that restaurants in Japan use for the prosaic business of window display, and that visitors have gleefully added to the canon of pop art.
1995   Independent (Nexis) 10 Dec. 2   Mick taught himself to play the guitar and spent ‘a great deal of time’ studying songwriting; not just the soul and R'n'B legends‥but the whole rock canon—the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin and the Velvet Underground, but especially The Beatles.
1998   Herald (Glasgow) 3 Sept. 22   The concept has settled comfortably into the canon of accepted biological theory.

















________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Joel S. Berson [Berson at ATT.NET]
Sent: Friday, April 27, 2012 2:26 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: OED Q: "canon" as "accepted body of works"?

Is this sense not in the OED?  I must have missed it.

Joel

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