ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a historical overview of the idea of the canon from Ancient Greece to the 21st century, charting its etymology, various meanings, and usages in literary studies. Situating the idea of the literary canon specifically in the teaching of literature, this chapter then details major trends and movements in the teaching of literature from the Uniform Lists in the late 1800s, the founding of the NCTE in 1911, the Dartmouth Seminar in 1966, and then to the more recent Common Core Teaching Standards. It outlines three broad, though not mutually exclusive, gatekeepers of the canon in the teaching of literature: interpretive practices, cultural and political uses of literature, and systems of categorization. It likewise gives a historical overview of these practices, which in fact predate the discipline of literary studies, in order to explain processes of canon formation that continue to this day as integral and normalized aspects of the teaching of literature.
