I really don't see anything wrong with a British educational system preferring British works, all other things being equal. American systems certainly prefer American works, and one remembers the classic moment in the 1950s when the House Un-American Activities Committee made the inarguable declaration that Christopher Marlowe was un-American.
Shakespeare, Dickens, Bobby Burns, Keats and Yeats, Shelley (both of them), James Joyce, George Orwell ... that was part of my American misspent high school years.
Poe, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Shirley Jackson (The Lottery), Hemingway, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, O. Henry, Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter), Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage), Washington Irving (The Legend of Sleepy Hallow), and Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451).
And outside of English-language originals, that is "world literature," there was (in translation) Cervantes, Homer, Kafka, and Marx -- yes, I read Karl Marx in literature class as an example of Romantic-era non-fiction. It was hard to take Communism seriously after that.
And, voluntarily, Phillip K. Dick, Henry David Thoreau, and Anne Frank.
What strikes me most is how much time I must have had to read back then.
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(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-25 07:02 pm (UTC)(Although I am getting the feeling that Steinbeck is more in vogue in Britain than in the US at the moment.)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-25 07:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-25 08:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-25 08:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-26 06:33 pm (UTC)Oh, and Tolkien, but we read him voluntarily.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-26 08:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-27 06:38 am (UTC)And outside of English-language originals, that is "world literature," there was (in translation) Cervantes, Homer, Kafka, and Marx -- yes, I read Karl Marx in literature class as an example of Romantic-era non-fiction. It was hard to take Communism seriously after that.
And, voluntarily, Phillip K. Dick, Henry David Thoreau, and Anne Frank.
What strikes me most is how much time I must have had to read back then.