Classical canon

The Western canon is the body of books, music, and art that scholars generally accept as the most important and influential in shaping Western culture. It includes works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, music, art, sculpture, and architecture generally perceived as being of major artistic merit and representing the high culture of Europe and North America. University of California philosopher John Searle suggests that the Western canon can be roughly defined as "a certain Western intellectual tradition that goes from, say, Socrates to Wittgenstein in philosophy, and from Homer to James Joyce in literature". The Bible, a product of Middle Eastern culture, has been a major force in shaping Western culture, and "has inspired some of the great monuments of human thought, literature, and art".

The canon of books, including Western literature and Western philosophy, has been most stable, although expanding to include more women and racial minorities, while the canons of music and the visual arts have greatly expanded to cover the Middle Ages and other periods, once largely overlooked. Some examples of newer media such as cinema have attained a precarious position in the canon.

There has been an ongoing debate over the nature and status of the canon, especially in America, since at least the 1960s, much of which is rooted in critical theory, feminism, critical race theory, and Marxism. In particular, postmodern studies have argued that the body of scholarship is biased because the traditional main focus of academic studies of Western culture and history has only been on works produced by European men.

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