| The present study set out to examine to what extent high school literature anthology samples of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s reflect a change in our current postmodern era from textbooks of the 1960s and 1970s with respect to gender, race and ethnicity as measured in the shifting selections of authors in the works of the most influential textbooks. Criterion purposeful sampling techniques were employed relying on data culled from content analysis of textbooks from the top three literature anthology publishers. These three publishers and their subsidiaries constitute the basis of the present study, with a specific focus on their high school American literature anthologies, which are usually used for teaching in the 11th grade year. In order to trace the possible changes that have occurred in these textbooks over the last half-century a content analysis of these anthologies was employed. The content analysis involved four factors: the author's gender, author's race and/or ethnicity, the genre of the work selected for inclusion in the textbook, along with the number of pages allotted to a given author in a given text. Texts were divided by decade starting from 1960, then moving through the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, up to the current time. In all, 23 textbooks from the three largest textbook companies were used in the study. |
