The Conversation

Friday essay: the literary canon is exhilarating and disturbing and we need to read it

Author: The Conversation USA

Let's critique the literary canon, but we shouldn't throw the Brontës out with the bathwater. The Brontë Sisters, by Patrick Branwell Brontë, circa 1834.

The Age of Criticism, Martin Amis once wrote, started in 1948 and ended with OPEC.

That is, it started with the publication of F.R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition – the...

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