SOURCE: “Introduction: The Cultural Politics of Canons,” in Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century “British” Literary Canons, edited by Karen R. Lawrence, University of Illinois Press, 1992, pp. 1-19.

In the following essay, Lawrence discusses some of the sociological, cultural, literary, historical, and political currents at play in determining and changing the literary canon.

It seems that everyone is talking about canons today, but the debate has entered a new phase. On the one hand, we have reached a point where canonical reconsideration has become fashionable within academe. A colleague who is editing a book on canons recently wrote to me, “Canons to the left of us, canons to the right. I'm used to being in the vanguard and not on the bandwagon.” Indeed, the genesis of this collection is a certain legitimation in the American academy of the kind of discourse it proposes, for a number of essays...