Canon Vs. Culture

Canon Fodder

Women’s Studies and the (British) Literary Canon

JESSICA MUNNS

Stuart Hall has described the impact of women’s studies on cultural studies: both fields emerged more or less simultaneously in the 1960s, but initially they existed in isolation from each other. In 1976 a group of women published a manifesto, Women Take Issue, expressing their anger at the masculinist bias of the Birmingham Center for Cultural Studies. As Hall memorably puts it, “as a thief in the night, it broke in; interrupted, made an unseemly noise, seized the time, crapped on the table of cultural studies.”¹ After Women Take Issue, cultural studies could not go on in the same way. Alongside studies of class, the main thrust of Marxist-oriented, British cultural ...