User:BillDeanCarter/Sources on the Canon Wars

Sources on the canon wars
Here are some sources on the canon wars. I have not read all of these closely, but they looked like they would be good introductions. Yes, you are right that there should be a page on the canon wars, but I am not prepared to write it at this point. By the way, if you want a general introduction to literary theory anytime along the way, Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction is a good one. Awadewit Talk 02:33, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Kenneth R. Johnston, "The NEH and the Battle of the Books," Raritan: A Quarterly Review 12.2 (1992)
 * David H. Richter, The Critical Tradition (there is a unit on the canon wars in this introductory textbook)
 * Patrick Brantlinger, Who Killed Shakespeare?  What's Happened to English since the Radical Sixties
 * Leslie Fielder, What Was Literature? Class Culture and Mass Society (describes some of the breakdown between the high literary and pop culture)
 * Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, Part I (a very important piece of feminist criticism that challenged the "dead white men" canon - British)
 * Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860 (another important piece of feminist criticism; challenged the aesthetic basis of the "dead white men" canon - American)
 * Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (an important piece of race criticism)
 * John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, Chapter 1 (if you read this, read it last - it has a lot of literary theory in it and can be dense)
 * Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education (addressing some of these ideas from a conservative perspective - D'Souza is largely regarded as a crackpot, though - see his most recent books)
 * David Lehman, Signs Of The Times - Deconstruction And The Fall Of Paul De Man (another conservative viewpoint)
 * Allen Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (another conservative viewpoint, more thoughtful)