“The value of literature” is in itself a tautological proposition. Declaring that a particular piece of writing is “literature” makes a statement about its value. It distinguishes individual pieces of writing from the vast mass of written material by making claims about the formal characteristics and affective power that allow them to be included in “literature,” and it implies that those texts have a value that is not contingent on the tastes or judgement of readers from a particular place or time.

The creation of literature as a locus of value thus depends critically on the work of its advocates. In particular, professional literary critics sustain the continuity of literature from the past through the work of editing, interpretation, and analysis. Texts, whose language and social assumptions present barriers to immediate readerly engagement, can, with the help of this work, be valued as “literature,” and that value is perpetuated in the educational curricula of literary institutions.

The powerful apologias for literary value that appear in Shakespeare's sonnets offer an interesting example of the process of creating literary value. Those poems use familiar early modern tropes to contrast the decay of the sublunary and postedenic physical world with the enduring power of his verse and the eternal memory of his beloved:

The effect of this and other sonnets is to hold still the passage of time in the tight formal structure of the sonnet while making a statement about the deep connections between past and present. The intellectual work of understanding and reflecting on those connections is reiterated in the historical processes of literary studies and provides eloquent support for the claims made for the poems’ value across time.