Complete the account of literary survival.
A work survives by being ______, and it is copied because it is ______. Eliot argued that tradition is not inherited but obtained with great ______, and that a genuinely new work ______ the existing order rather than being added to the end of it.
Word bank: copied · taught · labour · rearranges · printed · forgotten
Hints
- The first two describe the physical mechanism of survival before printing.
- Eliot's essay is "Tradition and the Individual Talent"; his verb for what a new work does to the order is stronger than "joins".
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A work survives by being copied, and it is copied because it is taught. Eliot argued that tradition is not inherited but obtained with great labour, and that a genuinely new work rearranges the existing order rather than being added to the end of it.
Manuscript culture makes the chain explicit: copied because taught, taught because valued. Eliot's claim that the new work rearranges the whole order is the reason a canon cannot be a queue, admitting a work changes the meaning of everything already in it.
Practise The Canon, Tradition and the Idea of a Classic
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