The Western canon is the embodiment of high-culture literature, music, philosophy, and works of art that are highly cherished across the Western world, such works having achieved the status of classics.

Recent discussions upon the matter emphasise cultural diversity within the canon. The canons of music and visual arts have been broadened to encompass often overlooked periods, whilst recent media like cinema grapple with a precarious position. Criticism arises, with some viewing changes as prioritising activism over aesthetic values, often associated with critical theory, as well as postmodernism. Another critique highlights a narrow interpretation of the West, dominated by British and American culture, at least under contemporary circumstances, prompting demands for a more diversified canon amongst the hemisphere.

There is no official list of works that a recognized panel of experts or scholars agreed upon that is "the Western Canon," nor has there ever been such. A corpus of great works is an idea that has been discussed, negotiated, and criticized for the past century.

A classic is a book, or any other work of art, accepted as being exemplary or noteworthy. In the second-century Roman miscellany Attic Nights, Aulus Gellius refers to writers as "classicus... scriptor, non proletarius" ("A distinguished, not a commonplace writer"). Such classification were initiated with the Greeks' ranking their cultural works, with the word canon (ancient Greek κανών, kanṓn: "measuring rod, standard"). Similarly, early Christian Church Fathers declared as canon the authoritative texts of the New Testament, preserving them given the expense of vellum and papyrus and mechanical book reproduction. Thus, being included in a canon ensured a book's preservation as the best way to retain information about a civilization. In contemporary use, the Western canon defines the best of Western culture. In the ancient world, at the Alexandrian Library, scholars coined the Greek term Hoi enkrithentes ["the admitted", "the included"] to identify the writers in the canon. Although the term is often associated with the Western canon, it can be applied to works of literature, music and art, etc. from all traditions, such as the Chinese classics.

With regard to books, what makes a book "classic" has concerned various authors, from Mark Twain to Italo Calvino, and questions such as "Why Read the Classics?", and "What Is a Classic?" have been considered by others, including T. S. Eliot, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Michael Dirda, and Ezra Pound.

The terms "classic book" and Western canon are closely related concepts, but are not necessarily synonymous. A "canon" is a list of books considered to be "essential", and it can be published as a collection (such as Great Books of the Western World, Modern Library, Everyman's Library or Penguin Classics), presented as a list with an academic's imprimatur (such as Harold Bloom's), or be the official reading list of a university. In The Western Canon Bloom lists "the major Western writers" as Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, Miguel de Cervantes, Michel de Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce and Marcel Proust.

A university or college Great Books Program is a program inspired by the Great Books movement begun in the United States in the 1920s by John Erskine of Columbia University, which proposed to improve the higher education system by returning it to the western liberal arts tradition of broad cross-disciplinary learning. These academics and educators included Robert Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, Stringfellow Barr, Scott Buchanan, Jacques Barzun, and Alexander Meiklejohn. The view among them was that the emphasis on narrow specialization in American colleges had harmed the quality of higher education by failing to expose students to the important products of Western civilization and thought.

The essential component of such programs is a high degree of engagement with primary texts, called the Great Books. The curricula of Great Books programs often follow a canon of texts considered more or less essential to a student's education, such as Plato's Republic, or Dante's Divine Comedy. Such programs often focus exclusively on Western culture. Their employment of primary texts dictates an interdisciplinary approach, as most of the Great Books do not fall neatly under the prerogative of a single contemporary academic discipline. Great Books programs often include designated discussion groups as well as lectures, and have small class sizes. In general students in such programs receive an abnormally high degree of attention from their professors, as part of the overall aim of fostering a community of learning.