Debating the Canon: A Reader from Addison to Nafisi

Debating the Canon is a one-stop collection of the most important conversations regarding the development and future of the literary canon, with essays by T.S. Eliot, David Hume, Samuel Johnson, Leo Strauss, Elaine Showalter, Harold Bloom, Elizabeth Meese, and Henry Louis Gates to name but a few. Over the past two decades, the debate over the Great Books has been the central public controversy concerning the cultural content of higher education. Debating the Canon provides the first primary-source overview of these ongoing arguments. Many of these contributions to this debate have achieved "canonical" status themselves. Through their focus on the canon, the full spectrum of approaches to literary studies is represnted here. This collection places the recent debate within a larger context of literary criticism's development of a canon, going back to the eighteenth century. Morrissey's introductions provide context for the conversations, and together comprise a history of the debate over the Great Books.