Literature and the New Culture Wars

Triggers, Cancel Culture, and the Teacher's Dilemma

Deborah Appleman author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:WW Norton & Co

Published:7th Oct '22

Should be back in stock very soon

Literature and the New Culture Wars cover

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.

ISBN: 9781324019183

Dimensions: 193mm x 122mm x 20mm

Weight: 245g

192 pages