Canon wars grew from postimperial demographic shifts, not pure aesthetics

Evidence

The values enshrined in the great novels of the Western canon are claimed to operate irrespective of social, geographical, or any other context, and their meanings are claimed to be singular and unequivocal. Nafisi articulates a deeply conservative view of literature and criticism in keeping with those other near-contemporary volleys in the so-called curriculum wars of the 1980s and 1990s. As a response to the new, vigorous assertion of black rights as well as broader patterns of postimperial population movement, questions were raised from the 1970s on about the representativeness of the established canon of great literary works as an educational tool in the multicultural societies of the West. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 230

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the reader’s interest in how Islamophobia is spread via invoking Western civilizational values, connecting to the cultural-war strand of Morey’s argument.