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

Stefan Collini was for many years Professor of English and Intellectual History at Cambridge, and is now Professor Emeritus. Every few years he has published a major book on one or other of is two specialisms and they are always superbly researched and authoritative. Here he focuses on both English and intellectual history, providing a petty exhaustive account of English studies in UK universities from their beginnings in the mid nineteenth century until the 1960s.

The book is six hundred pages long and very wide ranging in that it looks to cover the development and evolution of English teaching in all UK universities. A huge amount of detail is provided about the set texts, methods of assessment, academic journals and, most importantly, the underpinning philosophies. It is all very interesting, but the really fascinating material concerns the contributions of key, influential individuals both inside and outside the academy. Professors, in the main, who wrote key texts and contributed to the journals that everyone else read. The respective impact of figures such as Matthew Arnold, Arthur Quiller Couch, T.S Eliot, C.S Lewis, F.R Leavis and a large cast of other significant contributors are explored and assessed in detail.

Stefan Collini tries really hard not to focus too much attention on Oxford and Cambridge, but it is very hard having read this book not to conclude that their influence was vastly bigger than that of any other university, not least because so many of the lecturers employed across the country as the 'redbrick' and 'plate glass' institutions grew had been educated at one of the two ancient English universities and followed their leads. They in turn then educated the high school English teachers, leading to a pretty well-established consensus being developed about how the subject should be taught and what texts constituted a proper canon.

This does not mean, however, that there were no major disagreements through the century and a half that this book covers. One concerned the extent to which philology should form part of the syllabus, as well as anglo-saxon / early English texts. Gradually, over time, novels became more prominent (and then dominant) at the expense of poetry, plays and essays. There was also, in the twentieth century, a big divide between an Oxford tradition in English studies which focused on the historical development of English language and literature, eschewing in the main twentieth century writing, and a Cambridge tradition which was far more focused on close reading and criticism of texts and much less on the context in which they were written.

It took me several months to read this as it is long and quite dense, but I learned a huge amount and would like now to follow up some of the references further. The downside, of course, is that the book ends in the mid 1960s just before the structuralists, post-structuralists and other purveyors of critical theory came on the scene and changed everything. Perhaps their revolution will be the subject of another magnificent Collini tome in a few years time?