Contesting the Western Canon: A Response to Adam Kotsko

While significant content by female authors has been a feature for some time, the twenty-first-century 'global turn' in medieval literary studies, with its strong focus on cross-cultural and cross-linguistic exchange, is prompting the development of curricula that encourage students to compare the perspectives of Western authors with those of their contemporaries from Islamicate, African, and Asian cultures. [...]the field has produced some excellent work on the development of the idea of 'national literary traditions' in the eighteenth century and on the history of the discipline in the nineteenth. Setting this work as required secondary reading exposes students to the cultural, ideological, and scholarly conditions under which certain western medieval texts came to be valued over others, and what cultural and national values were reinforced (and individual interests served) in the development of literary studies as a university practice.