Book excerpt: It is apparent that every linguistic and literary tradition will wish to distinguish broad periods in its historical evolution. One way of demarcating such periods is by isolating and identifying dominant repertoires of texts, styles or types, which may be seen as preserving repositories of material, promoting literary models, privileging formal constraints, or inspiring theoretical reflections - or all of these. The present collection of studies represents the results of a colloquium held at the University of Groningen in 2001. The contributions range widely in area, time, and theme: from general theory of acceptation into the canon to particular case studies; from overall descriptions of cultural repertoires to their very manufacture; from Ancient Mesopotamia to the European avant-garde - taking in Homeric Greece, the Arabic world, the Middle Ages, Renaissance Humanism, and modern Dutch literature along the way.