Changes in Canonization and Fixity

After reading Adrian Johns' scathing "The Book of Nature and the Nature of the Book" in conjunction with Pope's "The Dunciad" and I am thoroughly convinced that 21st century assumptions about the "fixity" of the printed book are historically dependent. Though the tone of Pope's poem and prefactory materials is clearly satirical, the image it conjures distorts familiar notions about the author and how Western critical canons are formed.

Pope's success is portrayed as being engineered via a keen knowledge of London's publishing industry. The long list of quotations from Pope's advocates and detractors has one stand-out pattern: Pope's advocates all knew him personally, his detractors knew him only through his works. On the one hand, I take this as part of the satire's joke, but on the other, it is difficult to conceive of a 21st century Western pedagogy that would base its canon on an author's affability.

Nevertheless, it seems possible--and worthy of further investigation--that those authors of the 18th century who are today recognized in the Western canon are precisely those who navigated/overcame/survived early print culture. The skills needed to do so were clearly not just literary, but social and economic as well.

Looking ahead, if the economic structures of 18th century print culture so greatly impacted who achieved literary success, what might have changed by the time of Romanticism and Blakeian notions of artistic "genius?" And even further, to what extent has the myth of the genius author (perpetuated by critics like Harold Bloom) become entrenched in 21st century thought and 21st century publishing/culture industry?