Devolving English Literature - Hardcover

Crawford, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 019811298X ISBN 13: 9780198112983

Publisher: Clarendon Press, 1992

Synopsis

Questions the manner in which, since the 18th century, a supposed English cultural centre has controlled the way we read. The author interrogates the Anglocentricity of the subject "English literature", demonstrating how it has governed our reading of "unEnglish" and "provincial" texts. Dealing with English, American, Irish, Australian and other writings, Crawford concentrates on Scottish literature, which furnishes the most extended and acute model of a culture concerned to maintain and develop its own identity while engaging with England's linguistic and political dominance. Starting with the 18th-century "Scottish invention of English literature", Crawford traces in Boswell, Burns and others, the evolution of a distinctively British literature which culminated in Scott who, with Carlyle, encouraged 19th-century American writing and left rich legacies both to anthropology and the literary Modernism of Eliot, Pound, Joyce and MacDiarmid. This essentially provincial phenomenon of Modernism underwrites even Larkin, as well as such sophisticated post-British "barbarian" poets as Heaney, Harrison, Dunn, Murray and Walcott. This book contributes to the the current debates regarding English-speaking literary culture and the participation in it of non-English speakers, arguing for devolutionary readings, alert to nuances of cultural difference.

About this title

Review

"Devolving English Literature is a stunning book: original, extraordinarily wide-ranging, coherent, reflective, and strongly argued....A consistently impressive book."--Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 "Devolving English Literature is a stunning book: original, extraordinarily wide-ranging, coherent, reflective, and strongly argued....A consistently impressive book."--Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 "Devolving English Literature is a stunning book: original, extraordinarily wide-ranging, coherent, reflective, and strongly argued....A consistently impressive book."--Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 "Devolving English Literature is a stunning book: original, extraordinarily wide-ranging, coherent, reflective, and strongly argued....A consistently impressive book."--Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

About the Author

Robert Crawford is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St. Andrews

Edition details

• Publisher: Clarendon Press
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 019811298X
• ISBN 13: 9780198112983
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 330