Today I want to talk about the literary canon, the texts that have been judged to be worthwhile and enduring and therefore deserving of special status in our culture. I’m also going to talk about the ...

Too often, we forget that fights about what we shouldn’t read are also battles over what we should read. And that every time someone attempts to ban Toni Morrison or Ta-Nehisi Coates, they’re also ...

Here is a question that should trouble anyone who loves literature: why is 'The Great Gatsby' considered an American classic while dozens of equally accomplished novels from the 1920s have vanished ...

When you hear “Willa Cather,” you might think, “Oh yeah, I had to look up My Ántonia on SparkNotes in high school.” Or, if you’re a big literary fan, you might recall some of her other monumental and ...

(AP) Laura Ingalls Wilder, who already holds a special place in the hearts of millions of parents and children, soon will be added to the country’s official literary canon. The Library of America ...

The idea that literature contains multitudes is not new. For the greater part of its history, lit(t)eratura referred to any writing formed with letters. Up until the eighteenth century, the only true ...

When Percy Shelley called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” he was perhaps anticipating the future argument in poetics that pitted those who are interested in the form as primary a ...