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. 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 19th-century emergence of the university and literature as we know them today. They also provided long afterwards a naturalized set of framing assumptions.

The Global Wordsworth examines Anglophone writers who repurposed William Wordsworth's poetry. By reading Wordsworth in dialog with J. M. Coetzee, Lydia Maria Child, and Jamaica Kincaid, Katherine Bergren revitalizes our understanding of Wordsworth's career and its place in the canon.

English is now a global phenomenon no longer defined by fixed territorial, cultural and social functions. The Routledge Companion to English Studies provides an authoritative overview of the subject area. Taking into account the changing conceptualisations of English, this Companion considers both historical trajectories and contemporary perspectives whilst also showcasing the state-of-the-art contributions made by the established scholars of the field. The Routledge Companion to English Studies: provides a set of broad perspectives on English as a subject of study and research highlights the importance of the link between English and other languages within the concepts of multilingualism and polylingualism investigates the use of language in communication through the medium of digital technology covering key issues such as Digital Literacies, Multimodal Literacies and Games and Broadcast Language explores the role of English in education taking account of social, ethnographic and global perspectives on pedagogical issues. This collection of thirty-four newly commissioned articles provides a comprehensive and up-to-date picture of the dynamic and diverse field of English Studies and will be an invaluable text for advanced students and researchers in this area.

Explores the diverse forces that shaped developments in literature in the 1880s, an often overlooked literary decade.

In exploring Wordsworth's professionalization as a writer, the author's interpretations are coordinated by a single, albeit highly ramified, critical hypothesis: that Romanticism's aesthetic forms afforded the middle classes an imaginary furlough from the impinging consciousness of their tenuous socioeconomic status.

In this second edition of William Wordsworth: A Life, Stephen Gill draws on knowledge of the poet's creative practices and his reputation and influence in his life-time and beyond. Refusing to treat the poet's later years as of little interest, this biography presents a narrative of the whole of Wordsworth's long life—1770 to 1850—tracing the development from the adventurous youth who alone of the great Romantic poets saw life in revolutionary France to the old man who became Queen Victoria's Poet Laureate. The various phases of Wordsworth's life are explored with a not uncritical sympathy; the narrative brings out the courage he and his wife and family were called upon to show as they crafted the life they wanted to lead. While the emphasis is on Wordsworth the writer, the personal relationships that nourished his creativity are fully treated, as are the historical circumstances that affected the production of his poetry. Wordsworth, it is widely believed, valued poetic spontaneity. He did, but he also took pains over every detail of the process of publication. The foundation of this second edition of the biography remains, as it was of the first, a conviction that Wordsworth's poetry, which has given pleasure and comfort to generations of readers in the past, will continue to do so in the years to come.

The drama of consciousness and maturation in the growth of a poet's mind is traced from Wordsworth's earliest poems to The Excursion of 1814. Mr. Hartman follows Wordsworth's growth into self-consciousness, his realization of the autonomy of the spirit, and his turning back to nature. The apocalyptic bias is brought out, perhaps for the first time since Bradley's Oxford Lectures, and without slighting in any way his greatness as a nature poet. Rather, a dialectical relation is established between his visionary temper and the slow and vacillating growth of the humanized or sympathetic imagination. Mr. Hartman presents a phenomenology of the mind with important bearings on the Romantic movement as a whole and as confirmation of Wordsworth's crucial position in the history of English poetry. Mr. Hartman is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Iowa. "A most distinguished book, subtle, penetrating, profound."—Rene Wellek. "If it is the purpose of criticism to illuminate, to evaluate, and to send the reader back to the text for a fresh reading, Hartman has succeeded in establishing the grounds for such a renewal of appreciation of Wordsworth."—Donald Weeks, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

By taking a global perspective on teaching English, this work takes into account a wide variety of challenges English teachers face and stresses the importance of networking and communicating with colleagues around the world as a means of overcoming those challenges. A richly differentiated view on what it means to be an English teacher is offered, as are fascinating narratives about the diverse efforts of teachers in different communities. Points of view from contributors in North America, Australia, Chile, New Zealand, New Guinea, South Africa, and the United Kingdom are expressed and placed in an illuminating context with practical and theoretical considerations about teaching English.

The field of American women's writing is one characterized by innovation: scholars are discovering new authors and works, as well as new ways of historicizing this literature, rethinking contexts, categories and juxtapositions. Now, after three decades of scholarly investigation and innovation, the rich complexity and diversity of American literature written by women can be seen with a new coherence and subtlety. Dedicated to this expanding heterogeneity, The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature develops and challenges historical, cultural, theoretical, even polemical methods, all of which will advance the future study of American women writers – from Native Americans to postmodern communities, from individual careers to communities of writers and readers. This volume immerses readers in a new dialogue about the range and depth of women's literature in the United States and allows them to trace the ever-evolving shape of the field.

This book explores how British Romantic poetry--the writing, reading, and critical reception of it--reinforced British nationalism in the 19th century, ripening the political processes of nationhood that began with the first Act of Union in 1707. Using archival research on literary collections, criticism and reviews, this study documents the rise of bardic criticism in the 18th century, a style of literary criticism that reinvented the vernacular poet as a national bard and established a national role for poetry. Within this context, this book offers a new reading of major works by Romantic poets from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Felicia Hemans and Anna Letitia Barbauld, illuminating the ways they corroborated the public image of poets as bona fide national bards and advanced British nationalism, even when they intentionally set out to oppose or reform the politics of state.