ELI5: What makes the 'great writers' of history so great compared to today's writers?

English PhD student here:

The authors you mention are part of the "Western literary canon." Texts get in the canon for all sorts of reasons. "Beowulf" is going to be the beginning of your lit textbook because it's the oldest extant Old English poem. Not necessarily because it was the greatest but because the vellum it was written on somehow survived fires, floods, and being written over. It just kind of lucked out, while other texts disappeared. Homer as well. We don't have a ton of Ancient Greece epic poetry so he gets a spot more easily than say a contemporary writer that is competing for acclaim among a ton of other authors.

Shakespeare also garners some boost in fame due to a bit of luck. A couple of Shakespeare's colleagues published his plays, something that wasn't really that common in his time. Ben Jonson was actually the first to publish his own plays. Playwrights were very protective of their plays, for obvious reason: it was their livelihood and copyright law wasn't really a thing. So, they weren't published. Shakespeare lucked out a bit on this front.

Shakespeare isn't really an author as much as an object that gets molded for whatever purpose a particular cultural moment needs him for. For example, the Victorians, experiencing a good dose of nationalism and imperialism, saw Shakespeare as a symbol of their superior culture and virtue and would quote parts of his plays that seemed to play into the idea that England always conquers her foes. But they also tried to deny "Titus Andronicus" as one of Shakespeare's plays because it was so brutally violent, which didn't match their values. They also conveniently ignored the rampant jokes about venereal diseases, cuckoldry, and general sexuality. People like to hold Shakespeare up as some sort of cultural high bar, but he was primarily writing for the masses, who milled about his theater drinking, whoring, and loudly talking during the play.

In the 1970s, there was a lot of "canon busting" in English departments, with academics challenging the criteria used to exalt particular writers as superior to others. This was also the time of big cultural revolutions in and outside of the academy, so the fact that the canon was almost exclusively white men became a sticking point. For example, why isn't Zora Neale Hurston, a black female writer, given the same prestige as Fitzgerald, who was writing around the same time? The canon busters argued that there wasn't some objective standard that was being applied to come to the decision that canonical authors were better, but that it had a lot to do with ideology and picking others that promoted the dominant ideology.

Personally, I don't think Dante is inherently superior to a more contemporary author like Don Delillo or Chaucer. I don't think Hemingway is inherently superior to Alice Walker. And, honestly, only the ancient professors in my department buy into that sort of canon building. However, we have to continue to have classes on Shakespeare because administrators demand it and more students enroll in those classes than, say, a class on postmodern literature.

tl;dr There isn't anything that makes those authors better.

/r/explainlikeimfive Thread