Özet:

Literary anthologies are publicly available and historically significant bodies of writing, not only because they present a fine collection of the nation’s belles letres and artistic tendencies at a certain time in cultural history but also because they represent national and social interests, which characterize imaginary totalities of art, conveying the notion of cultural evolution and hierarchy. The historical, and to a great extent political, significance of anthologies merely lies in the selection processes during which the intellectual elite deemed worthy of being collected and handed down to the next generations as cultural heritage. This paper, therefore, will discuss the significance of anthologies and literary selections in the making of American literary tradition. The discussion will necessarily focus on the ideological and political decision making procedures that intersect and intervene with the literary production and consumption networks. It will be further stated that literary canons often refuse to stay as monolithic structures but instead they endlessly circulate and perpetually modify themselves in accordance with the current ideas and inclinations of the readers and shifting power hierarchies and changing the criteria for selection can’t mean in any way overthrowing the canon and ideology because each and every paradigmatic selection reinstitutes the process of canon formation and power relations that are strongly embedded in the process of production and consumption of art. Consequently, it will be shown that selection of texts as the linguistic capital never represents a consensus of a community of readers or literary elites but it is a product of power relations that created the hegemony of educational institutions, publishing houses and literary intelligentsia. American literary tradition, in this context, was shaped under the leadership of New England intelligentsia derived from historical and political functions of the region dominated by Puritan culture and values. The American character in literature, therefore, became a continuum of Puritan nativism and elitism, which was apparently a political and ideological project that aimed to establish a form of government, laws, private manners and pursuits and a certain type of people

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