When I started working on Lorca I noticed that people love the canon. I became 10 times more famous, meaning that maybe 150 people were interested in what I had to say, rather than only 15. I think that people's actual preferences are evident in what they do, not in what they claim they do. So while people talk about having a preference for things excluded from the canon, they don't really mean it. If you are dealing with a non-canonical writer, you have to first convince other people to care in the first place. With Lorca, that was never a problem. Even when meeting with my financial advisor the other week, for example, when I explained my research, he hadn't heard of Lorca, but then looked him up and became interested immediately.
I can say, people have a preference for the canon. But another way of saying that is that the canon is defined by this preference. Now the canon has a huge projection in middle-brow culture. It's not a snobbish or high-brow thing. In fact, it is only in certain sectors of academia that people even worry about questioning the canon. A true snob will care about a minor writer you've never heard of.
By middle-brow here, I mean Harold Bloom books on Shakespeare or on the Western canon, movies made from Jane Austen, Shakespeare movies, the appearance of Dante's inferno in a tv series like "Murder in a Small Town." My theory is that truly canonical writers spawn more than scholarly study: they enter popular culture, more specifically the upper segment of pop culture that I am calling middle-brow here.
Lorca is the subject of novels, plays, operas and art songs, comic books (or "graphic novels," the middle-brow version of comics), illustrated editions, film adaptations, imitations, parodies, homages, and translations, of course. There is a whole secondary body of work inspired by him, in practically any genre you can think of. So, for example, there will be statues and portraits of him.
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