The Lithuanian High School Literary Canon: Reconstructing the Developments of a Century

Abstract

This paper reconstructs the developments of the Lithuanian high school literary canon from 1918 to 2018. Drawing on the theoretical framework of descriptive canon research, attributed to the theoretical field of cultural sociology, we investigate how ideological shifts have shaped education policies as well as the selection and interpretation of literature taught in secondary education over the past hundred years. We argue that the school, more than any other institution, has the power to establish and disseminate normative literary values across generations. Using a large corpus of published and archived sources, we examine how Lithuanian literature was defined in the country’s high schools, how its historical narrative was modelled, and what criteria were used by the authors of high school literary curricula and learning materials to select writers and their works during three historical periods: the First Republic of Lithuania (1918–1940), the Soviet occupation (1940–1990), and the post-independence era (since 1990). We analysed not only the canon of authors and works of literature, but also their dominant interpretation in the learning materials of each specific period. This reconstruction of the Lithuanian high school literary canon contributes to broader comparative research on the formation of literary canons, particularly in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.