English Studies ― The State of the Discipline, Past, Present, and Future

English Studies: The State of the Discipline, Past, Present, and Future is an accessible and wide-ranging consideration of concerns facing English Studies and its unique position within the university and society. It intervenes in current debates about the future of English Studies, the Arts and Humanities, and the university itself. Bringing together a proposal for English to be understood as a 'boundary practice'; an exploration of the study-guide genre; an account of Derrida's 'the university without condition'; a case study of English and 'employability'; a consideration of how the subject might negotiate current technological changes and government interventions; and the dilemma of cognitive literary criticism and the relationship between English in Higher Education and Secondary Education, contributors to this volume draw out pedagogical ideals that lie at the heart of English Studies, tracing, in the face of current challenges, historical and contemporary debates surrounding English Studies in the university.

Niall Gildea, Helena Goodwyn, Megan Kitching and Helen Tyson are all currently PhD candidates and teaching associates at Queen Mary, University of London. Their research interests include: eighteenth-century British literature; deconstruction; nineteenth and twentieth-century transatlantic fiction and journalism; modernism; and psychoanalysis.