Stefan Collini, "Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Stefan Collini

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,