Institutionalizing English Literature — The Culture and Politics of Literary Study, 1750-1900

This book has a dual purpose. First, it presents a detailed historical record of how the academic discipline of English literary study began in British universities. It traces the process of academic legitimation and autonomy from Adam Smith, who first offered formal university lectures on English literature, between 1748 and 1751, to the formation of the Oxford English School by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1904.
Much of this material is drawn directly from the lives and careers of the prominent professors who were the avatars of the new discipline. The author examines pedagogical practices, programmatic decisions, and shifting political currents of academic fashion. The primary focus is on two institutions, the University of Edinburgh and University College, London. Not only were they in the forefront in the initial disciplinary formation of English literary study, they were both especially sensitive registers of continually changing ideological imperatives and scholarly trends.
The second purpose of the book is to demonstrate, to those who consider the politicization of literary study a contemporary plague, that political ideologies and ethnocentric parochialism have consistently determined the historical development of the discipline, and that the institutional history of English literary study is largely a history of ideological and racial controversy. Though basically historical in its methodology, the book extends into areas of general literary criticism and cultural theory, examining how an interdisciplinary network of relations created the political climates and shaped the scholarly trends that determined the discipline's history.
The record of the genesis of English literary study is in part a record of major institutional commitments, of the publication of definitive critical works, of the shaping of a teachable canon of literary works, and of the vibrant and colorful personalities who left their marks on generations of students. But as this book shows, the full record also includes other traces of the past: salary disputes, professional jealousies and conflicts, conflicting pedagogical visions, British racial distinctions, economic constraints, the marketing of books, committee bureaucracies, degree requirements, political demagoguery, social and religious pressures, and many others.