The Patriots' Pushkin

Abstract

A nation's shared culture reflects its status as an "imagined community."1 Different sections of the imagined community, however, have their own ideas about what the shared culture should include and what ought to be excluded from it, and this incessant debate over the cultural canon affects the nation's sense of identity. The rise of the civil rights movement and feminism in the United States in the 1960s, for example, challenged the dominance of "dead white males" in the American literary canon. Political as much as aesthetic considerations, then, dictate what the canon of works that constitute any shared culture should include. Similarly, political circumstances often determine the "correct" interpretation of these works.