Thomas P. Miller defines college English studies as literacy studies and examines how it has evolved in tandem with broader developments in literacy and the literate. He maps out "four corners" of English departments: literature, language studies, teacher education, and writing studies. Miller identifies their development with broader changes in the technologies and economies of literacy that have redefined what students write and read, which careers they enter, and how literature represents their experiences and aspirations. Miller locates the origins of college English studies in the colonial transition from a religious to an oratorical conception of literature. A belletristic model of literature emerged in the nineteenth century in response to the spread of the "penny" press and state-mandated schooling. Since literary studies became a common school subject, professors of literature have distanced themselves from teachers of literacy. In the Progressive era, that distinction came to structure scholarly organizations such as the MLA, while NCTE was established to develop more broadly based teacher coalitions. In the twentieth century New Criticism came to provide the operating assumptions for the rise of English departments, until those assumptions became critically overloaded with the crash of majors and jobs that began in 1970s and continues today. For models that will help the discipline respond to such challenges, Miller looks to comprehensive departments of English that value studies of teaching, writing, and language as well as literature. According to Miller, departments in more broadly based institutions have the potential to redress the historical alienation of English departments from their institutional base in work with literacy. Such departments have a potentially quite expansive articulation apparatus. Many are engaged with writing at work in public life, with schools and public agencies, with access issues, and with media, ethnic, and cultural studies. With the privatization of higher education, such pragmatic engagements become vital to sustaining a civic vision of English studies and the humanities generally.

This reference guide traces the "Writing Across the Curriculum" movement from its origins in British secondary education through its flourishing in American higher education and extension to American primary and secondary education.

This volume describes the formative years of English composition courses in college through a study of the most prominent documents of the time: magazine articles, scholarly reports, early textbooks, teachers' testimonies-and some of the actual student papers that provoked discussion. Includes writings by leading scholars of the era such as Adams Sherman Hill, Gertrude Buck, William Edward Mead, Lane Cooper, William Lyon Phelps, and Fred Newton Scott.

Here, the author examines gossip as a form of 'verbal grooming', and as a means of strengthening relationships. He challenges the idea that language developed during male activities such as hunting, and that it was actually amongst women that it evolved.

Pre-1950s composition history, if analyzed with the right conceptual tools, can pluralize and clarify our understanding of the relationship between the writing of college students and the writing’s physical, social, and discursive surroundings.

In the nineteenth century, advanced educational opportunities were not clearly demarcated and defined. Author Amy J. Lueck demonstrates that public high schools, in addition to colleges and universities, were vital settings for advanced rhetoric and writing instruction. Lueck shows how the history of high schools in Louisville, Kentucky, connects with, contradicts, and complicates the accepted history of writing instruction and underscores the significance of high schools to rhetoric and composition history and the reform efforts in higher education today. Lueck explores Civil War- and Reconstruction-era challenges to the University of Louisville and nearby local high schools, their curricular transformations, and their fate in regard to national education reform efforts. These institutions reflect many of the educational trends and developments of the day: college and university building, the emergence of English education as the dominant curriculum for higher learning, student-centered pedagogies and educational theories, the development and transformation of normal schools, the introduction of manual education and its mutation into vocational education, and the extension of advanced education to women, African American, and working-class students. Lueck demonstrates a complex genealogy of interconnections among high schools, colleges, and universities that demands we rethink our categories and standards of assessment and our field’s history. A shift in our historical narrative would promote a move away from an emphasis on the preparation, transition, and movement of student writers from high school to college or university and instead allow a greater focus on the fostering of rich rhetorical practices and pedagogies at all educational levels. As the definition of college-level writing becomes increasingly contested once again, Lueck invites a reassessment of the discipline’s understanding of contemporary programs based in high schools like dual-credit and concurrent enrollment.

Includes section "Reviews".