The Return of England in English Literature

This lively and wide-ranging study argues that English Literature as typically understood has not been English, but tailored to UK state needs, and that it has blocked a literature of England, which has nevertheless recently become irresistible. Going back through twentieth century literary and cultural history, it shows that this re-emergence has risen unevenly since the 1910s, and has struggled against the foundations of the discipline, which it sees in the reaction against the French Revolution. Where after 1815 English Literature helped to export a certain idea of a pre-existing canon in empire, these conditions have now decayed to the extent that a re-emergence of a 'placed' literature of England is inevitable. This study relates the emergence of England in literature to the constitutional changes which have unwound in devolution, and shows that these intimately related moments of rupture will have widespread impact on the Humanities.