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 &la" 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.