ABSTRACT
The 1995 revised National Curriculum for English presents a familiar roll-call of great authors. Shakespeare comes first, and is followed by lists of pre-1900 stipulated and post—1900 suggested writers. These range from Chaucer through Spenser and Milton to Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Shelley, nineteenth-century novelists like Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, and twentieth-century modernists like T.S.Eliot and James Joyce. This is the canon of English literature, the backbone of university courses, the focus of literary criticism, and the staple of the publishing industry. It looks very similar to my own school English literature curriculum in the 1960s: an authoritative cultural tradition that we were taught to appreciate through ‘analysing and discussing’ themes, meanings and techniques of plot and characterisation. However, although the same literary heritage appears, apparently unchanged and unproblematical in the 1995 orders, this canon has been substantially challenged and debated over the last twenty years.
