Stefan Collini, Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain

Stefan Collini. Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain. Pp. xx + 642. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2025. Hardback, £35.

Literature and Learning presents a revisionist history of English studies from its institutional origins in the nineteenth century to a centrality in university study of the humanities by the 1960s. It is informed by meticulous research into the development of syllabuses and pedagogic practices across UK English departments. Rigorous empirical analysis provides a salutary counterweight to inflated claims made for ‘Eng Lit’ yet serves as a foundation for modest, more durable arguments for the continuing value of this academic subject in our period of institutional turbulence.

Collini charts the emergence of the discipline of English literature in British universities from the cultural hegemony of Classics, which it eventually supplanted as a gentlemanly preparation for the ruling elite’s Civil Service exams, despite resistance from a public-school educated establishment. Bolstered by the exact scholarship of philology, ‘English Language and Literature’ gained a secure foothold at London University from the mid-nineteenth century, although this was increasingly viewed by opponents of the positivist pretentions of philology (above all, by combative John Churton Collins) as two halves of a ‘pantomime horse’ (p. 561). The popularity of a national canon of writers from Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton to the Romantics, formed outside the academy, furnished the cultural capital to broaden the academic study of English from dry linguistic exercises to formative nourishment for the student’s soul.