the concept of a corpus of books

Hi all,

continuing a previous post concerning 'groundbreaking books',
i now realize that what i want to find is:

Books that define a literature genre, either by initiating it
or by bringing it to its highest peak.

My concern is to move away from the single, standalone book,
toward a more broad view of the corpus which the book naturally belongs to.

This might be a formidable task, requiring d

the concept of a corpus of books