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Here are five responses to the query for articles and essays (critical and theoretical) on the shaping of the canon for modern American fiction.
RBass

A good place to start is Richard Ohmann's "The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960-1975," in his collection of essays _Politics of Letters_. He analyzes what press puts out a book, where it's reviewed, what lists it makes, etc. as a method of exploring what gets taught in college courses.

John Orr
English Department
University of Portland
orr@uofport.edu

I would highly recommend Phillip Bryan Harper's *Framing the Margins: On the Social Logic of Postmodernism*, which despite its title, is primarily a reading of 20th century U.S. fiction, primarily through the lens of "social marginality" (his term), the ways that people from oppressed groups expressed through fiction forms of consciousness and ambivalence that, in the 1970s in the work of Barthelme and Carver became known as "postmodern". It is specifically intended as a canon-altering book.

Kenny Mostern
UC-Berkeley Ethnic Studies Graduate Group
Against: racism, sexism, homophobia, capitalism, militarism For: the truth--and the funk!

Check into the essay "Classroom Issues in Teaching a New Canon" by Paul Lauter. It appears as an "Afterword" to the Instructor's Guide to the Heath Anthology, second edition.

Paul P. Reuben

Essays that I've found indispensable when writing about the canon in general include several in *Critical Inquiry* Vol. 10.1 (Sept. 1983), an article by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in *Salmagundi * 72 (1986): 131-43 and one by Robert Scholes in the same issue, pages 101-17. (It's also a special issue on canons) Then there's *Opening Up the Canon: Selected Papers from the English Ins titute* ed. by Leslie Fielder and Houston Baker; an essay by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on Afro-American Tradition in *Afro-American Literature Study in the 1990s* and another by him in *New York Times Book Review* 26 Feb. 1989: 45. And how about Paul Lauter's book *Canons and Contexts* 1991. And Robert Von Hallberg, ed. *Canons* U of Chicago P 1984.

Bonnie Breandlin
Florida State English Dep't.
904-644-4230; bbraendl@english.fsu.edu

Here are two suggestions. I've been using Lentricchia & McLaughlin's CRITICAL TERMS FOR LITERARY STUDY as the main text in an Intro to Lit Studies course. The essay on CANON by John Guillory is very stimulating and would transfer nicely to a novel class. The other suggestion is Terry Eagleton's "What is Literature?" in his book LITERARY THEORY: AN INTRODUCTION. Of course there are a number of excellent feminist essays too . . . these that I suggest here provide a more general context that undergraduates might appreciate initially.

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Here are TWO more responses to the request for essays on the formation of the canon of modern fiction. The original query was about modern fiction, but essays about early fiction and canon formation are welcome too.

RBass

Since no one mentioned it, I'll suggest Jane Tompkins' _Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860_ (NY: Oxford UP, 1985), esp. the chapters, "Masterpiece Theatre: The Politics of Hawthorne's Literary Reputation" and "But is it any Good: The Institutionalization of Literary Value."

ShaunAnne Tangney
Univ. of Nevada

Here are a couple more suggestions for the Canon and Modern Fiction query: 1) Donald E. Pease, "New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions into the Canon" in Boundary 2, Spring 1990 17.1 pp1-37--good discussion of another piece by F. Crews in the New York Review of Books and of general American canon issues.

2) Florence Howe's introduction to Tradition and the Talents of Women--an essay on T. S. Eliot, Va. Woolf, and the future of "tradition"

3) Barbara Frey Waxman's essay "Canonicity and Black American Literature: A Feminist View" in MELUS 14.2, Summer 1987