Constitution of English Literature
Subtitle: The State, the Nation and the Canon
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 153
ISBN-13: 9781780930367
Subjects: English literature, history and criticism; National characteristics in literature
Description: Calls upon those working in English literature to see the ongoing underpinning of the discipline by the eighteenth-century unification which was codified by the Burkean constitutional settlement, and to understand this settlement not only in terms of content or canonical line-up, but more fundamentally in terms of English literature's methodologies. It suggests replacing it with a more open-ended, inclusive and internationalist literature, free of the founding imperial assumptions which created a "shadow-constitution."