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Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain de Stefan Collini

Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain

Autor Stefan Collini
en Limba Engleză Hardback – 10 apr 2025
The study and teaching of English literature is generally regarded as one of the central disciplines in the modern university, yet for much of its history it struggled to gain academic legitimacy and was frequently derided as 'a soft option'. Its early professors responded by emphasizing its scholarly character, foregrounding philology and literary history in ways that marked the syllabus far into the twentieth century. Stefan Collini provides here the first full account of the discipline's development from its late-eighteenth-century beginnings up to the early 1960s. Paying special attention to institutional settings, he challenges numerous assumptions about the character of universities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the detailed exploration of syllabuses, exam papers, and other institutional records, the impact of literary criticism is revealed to be later and more partial than is commonly assumed. Rather than seeing the early teaching of English literature as 'a substitute for religion' or 'a means to soften class conflict', Collini emphasizes the role of ideals of learnedness and scholarship, as well as of external factors such as opportunities for employment in the civil service and secondary school-teaching. There are full discussions of the parts played by such figures as John Churton Collins, A.C. Bradley, George Saintsbury, and Walter Raleigh, together with sceptical analyses of the decisive significance usually attributed to Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, and F.R. Leavis. Separate chapters are devoted to neglected aspects of the story such as the role of Classics, the importance of the subject for women's higher education, and the connections with English teaching in schools.Drawing on extensive use of institutional archives and records as well as the writings of contemporary participants, the book offers a vivid and wide-ranging history of English-as-discipline and its centrality across academic, literary, cultural, and educational life over the past two year hundred years, as well as a resounding testament to its continued importance and relevance today.
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780198800187
ISBN-10: 0198800185
Pagini: 656
Dimensiuni: 165 x 242 x 41 mm
Greutate: 1.14 kg
Editura: OUP OXFORD
Colecția OUP Oxford
Locul publicării:Oxford, United Kingdom

Recenzii

Stefan Collini's Literature and Learning (Oxford University Press), a history of English literature as a university subject in Britain, is a fine and substantial achievement. His approach, he says, is a "commitment to plenitude of empirical detail", and the book demonstrates a comprehensive grasp of the complex life of the discipline from the late 18th century to its heyday in the Sixties, ranging well beyond the usual focus on Oxford and Cambridge. It is also a delight to read, light on its feet, witty and fresh in its judgements and portraits.
An excellent and comprehensive treatment of the history of Literature in mainstream education in Britain from the 1860s to the 1960s. Collini is... one of our best writers: a meticulous and stylish authority on nineteenth and twentieth-century ideas.... Literature and Learning is a necessary contribution to the study of Literature in British educational history and one accomplished with characteristic erudition and energy.
Stefan Collini's monumental work of scholarship is a landmark publication in the field.... Collini's witty, elegant, and entertaining style make[s] such a lengthy tome a very enjoyable read.... What Collini has achieved is to add immensely to our knowledge of English studies, to change and clarify our understanding in numerous ways and to set a new standard of rigorous scholarship for any subsequent account.
An engrossing multidisciplinary saga of false starts, unlikely combinations and strange might-have-beens... Aware of the fatuousness of treating a single discipline in isolation, Collini traces the emergence of English in the interplay between academic subjects.... English emerges thoroughly defamiliarised from Collini's painstaking archival truffling and acute sensitivity to anachronism.
Collini's researches into unexplored corners of intellectual history never cease to amaze.... Spelunking with Collini into the depths of the not-too-distant past always turns out to be a delight and an education. This latest tome is no exception. One emerges from this tour more appreciative, more enlightened, and more critical of what is to be glimpsed aboveground these days.... It's not quite the only book of its kind, but very nearly so.
Rigorous empirical analysis provides a salutary counterweight to inflated claims made for "Eng Lit" yet serves as a foundation for modest, more durable arguments for the continuing value of this academic subject in our period of institutional turbulence.... While Collini is an appreciative guide to the centrality of English studies to British culture at the mid-century, his historical analysis is always critically acute, at times sharp, and no exercise in nostalgia.
In Professor Collini's hands all is nuance and fine shading... As might be expected from a work that roams unappeasably beyond its 600th page, Literature and Learning addresses its subject in the widest terms... This is a terrific book, which deserves the widest possible circulation.
English, as Stefan Collini observes in his wry and compendious new history of the discipline, Literature and Learning, tends to inspire an extravagant attachment rarely associated with, for example, geography or chemistry.... The subject remains an academic anomaly, a scholarly discipline premised on the acquisition not of knowledge but of aesthetic experience; on the unlikely marriage of (in Collini's happy phrase) "beauty and the footnote".
Collini's book is by far the most comprehensive, textured and nuanced history of the discipline we have, and it puts all other such studies in the shade... Literature and Learning is a magisterial book, stunningly rich with empirical detail as well as critical insight into the work of generations of scholars, professors, journals, departments, colleges, universities and governments... Literature and Learning is a splendid and enthralling book for anyone interested in the history of education and universities, and the rise and potential fall of English studies.

Notă biografică

Stefan Collini was educated at Cambridge and Yale. Following a Research Fellowship at St John's College, Cambridge, he was Lecturer, then Reader, in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex 1974-86; Lecturer, then Reader, then Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at the University of Cambridge 1986-2014. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and Guardian.