Our current “culture wars” have reshaped the politics of secondary literature instruction. Due to a variety of challenges from both the left and the right—to language or subject matter, to potentially triggering content or to authors who have been cancelled—school reading lists are rapidly shrinking. For many teachers, choosing which books to include in their curriculum has become an agonising task with political, professional and ethical dimensions.
In Literature and the New Culture Wars, Deborah Appleman calls for a reacknowledgment of the intellectual and affective work that literature can do, and offers ways to continue to teach troubling texts without doing harm. Rather than banishing challenged texts from our classrooms, she writes, we should be confronting and teaching the controversies they invoke. Her book is a timely and eloquent argument for a reasoned approach to determining what literature still deserves to be read and taught and discussed.
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Richard Beach is Professor Emeritus of English Education at the University of Minnesota, USA.
Deborah Appleman is the Hollis L. Caswell Professor and Chair of Educational Studies at Carleton College, USA.
Bob Fecho is Professor of English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, USA.
Rob Simon is Associate Professor of Multiliteracies in
