Banned In The USA: The Growing Movement To Censor Books In Schools

Hannah Whittenly https://preply.com 2m 457

The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.

For students who plan to major in English Literature, it’s crucial to pay attention to college reading lists – and now more so than ever, as the number of books being banned across the US is growing every month.

Language learning platform Preply conducted a study using the Open Syllabus database to determine the most studied books for English Literature courses at 170 US colleges. Here are the results ranked:

1. The Canterbury Tales | Geoffrey Chaucer

2. Frankenstein | Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

3. Paradise Lost | John Milton

4. The Yellow Wallpaper | Charlotte Perkins Gilman

5. Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad

6. Prufrock and Other Observations | T. S. Eliot

7. A Modest Proposal | Jonathan Swift

8. The Story of an Hour | Kate Chopin

9. A Rose for Emily | William Faulkner

10. Oedipus the King | Sophocles

11. Hamlet | William Shakespeare

12. A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories | Flannery O.’Connor

13. The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald

14. Letter From the Birmingham Jail | Martin Luther King

15. Young Goodman Brown and Other Tales | Nathaniel Hawthorne

16. Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison

17. The Metamorphosis | Franz Kafka

18. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl | Harriet A. Jacobs

19. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave | Frederick Douglass

20. A Room of One’s Own | Virginia Woolf

Please credit Preply with a link to their campaign page should you wish to use the information: https://preply.com/en/blog/the-most-studied-books-in-the-us/

Almost everyone can remember the books they studied in middle school, and according to our research those same texts are dominating English Literature syllabi today.

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer appears on English Literature syllabuses more than any other book, appearing on 139 out of the 170 examined. This collection of short stories, written sometime between 1387 and 1400, has played a significant role in making English the predominant language in literature.

Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is the second most studied book in the country featuring in 134 syllabi, with her tale of misunderstanding, misplaced fear, and love being just as relevant today as it was then.

Paradise Lost by John Milton takes the third spot for the most-read text, studied at 123 of the universities examined in the study.

While books are an unusually hot topic right now, many familiar titles are being studied as part of English Literature degrees around the US, highlighting the fact that students continue to enjoy many of the same classics their parents would have done before them.

Methodology

• We conducted an extensive analysis of syllabi from 170 American universities offering English Literature courses.
• By scraping Open Syllabus, we collected data on the most frequently studied literary work to compile our list of the most studied books in the United States.

Please remember to credit Preply with a link to their research page should you wish to use the information: https://preply.com/en/blog/the-most-studied-books-in-the-us/

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