ABSTRACT
The ultimate academic canonisation, in literature, is perhaps the Nobel Prize, which is based on recommendations by large numbers of professors. Just like the concept of literature, the canon takes shape within specific contexts; it is made, unmade and re-made by real people. Some would say that the very use of the term English Literature helped the canon, for a long time, exclude a lot of people that should have been in it. The great reaction against this got under way in the later decades of the twentieth century, in ways that were intimately connected with mass social movements such as civil rights and feminism. Just as black people still suffered discrimination in everyday life, so their writings had been cut out of the canon. Canons are influenced not just by critics and readers, but by schools, universities and the governments, which, in some cases, control what is read and taught at educational institutions.
