Publisher's Synopsis
Previous historical studies of 'English' have not looked closely at the similarities of its development in different cultural settings and educational systems. This book provides a cross-national perspective on attempts to establish, maintain, and modify the discursive practices that constituted English literary studies in universities. Drawing on archival sources, it takes three leading institutions as exemplary sites: Cornell University, in the United States; The University of London, in Britain; and the University of Melbourne, in Australia. - - Despite the somewhat different features of English as it developed in those places, a persistent genetic identity exists that is best understood as Romantic. More particularly, Wordsworth's writings, and a cluster of ideas, images, and attitudes associated with him, exerted a normative pressure on curriculum and pedagogy during the nineteenth-century emergence of the university and literature as we know them today. They also provided long afterwards a naturalized set of framing assumptions.
