The Routledge Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory, 2nd Edition

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CANON In its narrowest sense, the term canon means the works of an author that are considered to have been genuinely written by that author. But the term is used more often in critical theory in relation to its wider meaning, which refers to texts that have been considered by the literary establishment to be the most valuable examples of the literature produced by a particular culture or tradition. In short, the canon is composed of those books that a graduate of English literature would be expected to have read. Critical theory challenges the canon by objecting to what it sees as the ideologically motivated selection of texts and authors that gain access to it. The convenient fact that the canon is largely made up of texts written ...