Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain, by Stefan Collini, Oxford University Press, 656 pp, £35, ISBN: ‎978-0198800187.

In the late 1980s, when I was an undergrad at Trinity College Dublin, I took an elective seminar on literary theory. At this time, it was possible to pursue a four-year single Honours English degree at Trinty and never take a course on literary theory. But a friend at University College Dublin said it would change my life. It did. Under the enthusiastic supervision of an energetic and inquisitive young American graduate student, who was deputising for a tenured lecturer on sick leave, we read excerpts from Levi-Strauss and Barthes, Bourdieu and Baudrillard, Kristeva, Foucault and De Man.

Underpinning this reading were various introductory texts, of which the best known and most enjoyable was and is Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction. Eagleton introduced most of the Continental philosophical movements of the middle and later twentieth century and their implications for the reading of literature: phenomenology, hermeneutics and reader-response theory; Russian formalism, structuralism and semiotics; poststructuralism; and psychoanalysis. The book concluded with a declaration of ‘political criticism’, where Eagleton came clean and noted that he had excluded the Marxist tradition because the whole book was an exercise in Marxist reading.

But the first two chapters of Eagleton’s rapid survey were different from those that followed. ‘What is Literature?’ and ‘The Rise of English’ purported to explain the established ideas, figures and forces, against which the ‘new’ Continental ideas were to be deployed. Eagleton nimbly unpacked the concept of ‘literature’, conventionally understood to consist of canonical and prestigious work, and showed it to be a field of force and contest. And he showed how in the nineteenth century ‘men of letters’ emerged out of the ruins of Romanticism into the harder-edged utilitarianism of industrial Britain to argue for the value of cultural education, most famously Matthew Arnold. The Marxist Eagleton sought to argue that Arnold and his peers, seeing that the rampant capitalism of the Victorian age also brought with it a rising secularism and burgeoning middle and working classes, cast around for a new vehicle of cultural-political hegemony. The solution, Eagleton suggested, was held to be the discipline, study and pedagogy that we now call ‘English literature’.

Eagleton moved rapidly from Arnold to what is now known as the school of ‘Cambridge English’. The great figures of Cambridge English were IA Richards, William Empson, and FR Leavis. In the early and middle years of the twentieth century, they presided over the establishment of a powerful faculty with a unique sense of mission: their belief in the centrality of English to the university; to education more broadly; and to society as a whole. English literature and its study were the engine room of the making of humanity, and ‘practical criticism’ was the key to its operation.

But by the 1960s the established modes and ideas of literary study were perceived to be outdated, irrelevant, conservative. Importation of ‘radical’ ideas from France and Germany (often coming via an American relay) would give ‘English’ a sense of definition, a rigour, connection with the realm of ideas, history and politics it lacked in the Cambridge version. ‘Theory’, of which Eagleton was one of the major heralds, would sweep away the Leavisite and New Critical apolitical stodge and put literary study back at the cutting edge.

Eagleton’s story and his energy, intelligence and polemical verve galvanised me and my peers. We greeted the ‘new’ ideas with a mixture of excitement, iconoclasm and seriousness typical of uppity undergrads casting around for weapons with which to push the previous generation aside. Theory gave us those weapons and seemed to put us in touch with an avant-garde. It was marvellous, heady stuff.

But the problem with Eagleton’s story was that it was supported by flimsy historical evidence. His rhetorical verve carried him far ahead of a grasp of the empirical history of the discipline of English studies. His scepticism about the discipline’s history was and remains salutary. But a properly detailed account shows marked differences from his story. Such an account is offered in surely the most definitive manner by Stefan Collini’s massive and overwhelming Literature and Learning. Collini’s book is by far the most comprehensive, textured and nuanced history of the discipline we have, and it puts all other such studies in the shade.

Collini has long been one of the best intellectual historians in Britain. Professor emeritus of English literature and intellectual history at Cambridge, he began his career at Sussex where, with Donald Winch and John Burrow, he was part of a group of intellectual historians who paid particular attention to literature. From his landmark study of Victorian intellectual life, Public Moralists to his more recent Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, Collini has mapped British scholarly and public debate. Along the way, he has become a masterly essayist in the para-academic journals – the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and The Nation, among others. Most recently, he has made a crucial public contribution in his work on British higher education as it sinks ever further into the morass of business models and the New Public Management, culminating in two excellent books What Are Universities For? and Speaking of Universities. His James Ford Lectures at Oxford, published as The Nostalgic Imagination, delved into the history of English criticism. His new book straddles that kind of history of ideas and a very grounded, ‘thick description’ of the institutions within which, and partly because of which, English studies has developed. Collini charts the discipline from the early nineteenth century to its mid-twentieth century ‘meridian’, just at the dawn of the 1960s.

Literature and Learning is a magisterial book, stunningly rich with empirical detail as well as critical insight into the work of generations of scholars, professors, journals, departments, colleges, universities and governments. The long view enables Collini to track the grandest (or most trivial) trends and patterns. That this is done with dry humour, and much sympathy for all comers, only adds to the achievement. It’s not often that one can pick up a 660-page academic book and find it to be a ‘great read’. But Collini’s work is enjoyable and enlivening, as well as sharply perceptive.

Built around a central narrative, the book is woven from three parts. Firstly, the emergence of ‘English studies’ from adjacent or prior disciplines such as classics, or ‘rhetoric and belles-lettres’, and its growth through various stages: the combination and then the separation of ‘English language and literature’; the rise and fall of philology as a central methodology; the relation of the academic study of English to the wider world of writing and journalism; and the rise (driven significantly by TS Eliot, IA Richards and FR Leavis) of ‘criticism’ as the central concern of literary study. This story of the discipline and its inner workings is folded into a second, wider story of the institutions that housed and shaped the mutation of ideas: the changes and expansion of Britain’s institutions of higher education; the rise of the redbrick or ‘civic’ universities of the nineteenth century; the centrality of the University of London; the eventual realisation at Oxford and Cambridge that English literature and language were to be taken seriously; and the arrival of the ‘new universities’ of the 1960s. These two strands helped to form the third element which we’d now call a ‘canon’ of ‘English literature’. Though it is important to realise that for most of the nineteenth century that ‘canon’ was composed largely of poetry, buttressed by selections of non-fiction prose (Addison, Burke) and with almost no novels.

These three intertwined ‘stories’ offer a central spine for Collini’s approach. But along the way, he takes other cuts or perspectives into this material, and it is here that the sheer richness of his book becomes clear. Chapters on the importance of female students to the emerging discipline, or on the relation between literary pedagogy in the school system and in the universities, or on the most notable early professors – these contribute detail, context, alternative visions and fascinating re-assessments. For example, one comes to realise that though Arnold’s argument for cultural education as a bastion against ‘anarchy’ was invoked long after him, he was sceptical about the creation of an English department at Oxford. Or one comes to a proper grasp of the sheer erudition of some of the early professors of English such as Quiller-Couch or Saintsbury who, if named at all in Eagleton’s slash-and-burn account, were mocked as mere Victorian dilettantes. Collini writes chapters on the English Association and on the famous Newbolt Report of 1921, which confirmed and codified the state’s support for the growing discipline. ‘English literature’ was now conceived of both as a matter of national pride and as a ‘universal’ endowment.

Collini’s approach is often stunningly detailed. Notably, while a ‘radical’ history of English (of the kind advanced by Eagleton or his allies such as Peter Widdowson) focuses on conflict, dramatic debates or changes, theoretical innovations, even paradigm shifts, and leading or dominating maîtres a penser, Collini rightly notes that institutions and the practices they shelter are mostly characterised by continuities and slowly evolving consensus. He is not afraid to point out the similarities between the ways English was taught at Oxford, say, in the 1920s and the 1880s. There are highly textured accounts of the evolving machinery of the discipline: the appointment of ‘professors’ (early appointees were mostly young, often from other disciplines such as classics and philosophy, poorly paid and set to large volumes of teaching with little assistance); the coming of ‘departments’ (mostly long after ‘professors’ were appointed, and initially of the slightest institutional heft); and the arrival and growth of specialised journals, which gave English studies depth and identity, such as Notes and Queries, Scrutiny, Essays in Criticism, and Critical Quarterly.

The fundamental problem of English studies was, perhaps, bridging the gap between what Collini wittily calls ‘beauty and the footnote’: taste versus pedantry, aesthetics versus scholarship, pedagogy and research. For many years English had to struggle against the charge that, as the study of the vernacular written culture of British society, it could never attain the disciplinary rigour of classics or history or philosophy. Reading Shakespeare or Dryden was all very well, but it would not stretch or exercise the mind, it would not inculcate the stern values that came, it was thought, from reading Plato, Cicero or Thucydides. Philology was the main apparatus that seemed, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to lend English studies the desired analytical and ‘scientific’ rigour. But philology was mostly concerned with the early history of Old and Middle English, and the gradual insertion of ‘modern’ writing into the curriculum required different approaches. The divide between scholars and critics shaped the discipline, as did the nineteenth century stress on providing students with copious historical information about texts, as against the early twentieth century Richards/Leavis emphasis on confronting the student with primary texts and seeking to train their responses thereto.

There are some gaps in Collini’s account, though he is generally aware of them. He pays little attention to the imperial or Commonwealth growth of English studies, though he notes the great importance that training for the Indian civil service examinations (advertised in the Trinity College Dublin calendar in the latter half of the nineteenth century) had on the development of the discipline. Though noting the importance of Lord Kames and Hugh Blair’s teaching of ‘rhetoric and belles-lettres’ in the Scottish universities at the end of the eighteenth century, and referring occasionally to Edward Dowden, the first professor of English at Trinity College Dublin appointed in 1867, Collini’s story is mostly an English one. The rise of the discipline in Ireland – not only at Trinity College Dublin but at the Queen’s Colleges at Cork, Belfast and Galway – might have provided intriguing complications: English literary study has long been bound up with a sense of English nationalism, but in Ireland the discipline will have been lodged in the universities while outside on the street, so to speak, both Anglophone and Gaelic Irish cultural nationalisms were in the ascendant.

Literature and Learning is a splendid and enthralling book for anyone interested in the history of education and universities, and the rise and potential fall of English studies. As Irish universities follow their British and American fellows in becoming ever-more managed and commercialised, and as our wider culture becomes more various, and more industrialised and reified, Collini’s account of ‘English’ is a crucial stock-taking of the development of what we think a cultural education has been and might still hope to be.