English University Interviews - Authorship

The first thing to consider here is defining the Canon. We’ve done that in a separate article, but in case you need a reminder, the Canon is a particular group of works that were initially selected as ‘modern greats’ – and over time it has evolved, although retains a rather male-centric skew. The original development of the Canon concept would have involved a significant number of White men, simply because it was created by White men at a time when publishing works was the preserve of that same group. As such this question really asks us to interrogate previous societal roles, and then to consider whether we now ought to ‘undo’ the Canon to some extent, and remake it in a manner that is more representative. If we were to do this, we’d need to consider questions around meritocracy vs diversity – i.e. should we include more women despite potentially losing some of the ‘quality’ of the Canon – simply due to there being as much smaller pool of women writers to draw upon from the time of the original Canon? Alternatively, is it worth such a sacrifice to better represent the population? Or, indeed, is there a pool of undiscovered female writers from that time that deserve more attention, and it should be our responsibility as students of Literature to unearth them? This is a difficult question that is a good opportunity to show both an awareness of diversity and a sense of realism – in truth it is likely that there are fewer ‘great works’ from the late 1700s and early 1800s written by women than men, but this simply reflects poorly on the men of that era, who perhaps would have sought to control women and prevent them being able to publish works.