The Return of England in English Literature (PDF)

MICHAEL GARDINER is Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. His books include The Cultural Roots of British Devolution, Scottish Critical Theory Since 1960 and the forthcoming The Constitution of English Literature. He is also on the editorial boards of Textual Practice and OpenDemocracy.

'A brilliant book which makes other books on Englishness pale in comparison' - Professor Adam Piette, University of Sheffield, UK

'Born in 1946 and recalling the postwar 'New Elizabethan' push; the child of a headmistress who worked in the 'new towns' of South Oxhey and Stevenage; son of a printer wasted by the 'new managerialism,' I found the class history of my family repeatedly imbricated and recast by Gardiner's insight and argument. His interest in 'English' (the literary language and the cultural discipline) remapped my own postwar training. Gardiner's work enables me to read my own training in 'English Literature' as an inculcation in a cultural politics that was confused by the need to reinvent a British unity lost during the war, and to do so by way of a 'tradition' still 'great' enough to propose and concretize a new and transferable standard of Englishness. I read the book with an excitement matching the degree to which it provided an alternate genealogy to my past and to my discipline.' - Professor Richard Godden, University of California, Irvine, USA

Michael Gardiner's new book is a radical challenge to accepted conventions of the history of English literary studies and indeed the history of English literature. Intensely sensitive to the present moment of political change in the United Kingdom, The Return of England in English Literature charts two hundred years of educational priorities and political propaganda with reference not only to the ideology and history of Empire, but specifically to the nation we call England. In the last fifty years, postcolonial literatures, and literatures from Ireland, Scotland and Wales, have established their own forms, credentials and legitimising processes, but the literature of England has never been so comprehensively revalued in its own territorial context until now. This revolutionary study redresses the imbalance that has been culturally normative for a long time from within the very nation