Devolving English Literature questions the manner in which an assumed English cultural center has controlled the way we read since the eighteenth century. It interrogates the Anglocentricity of the subject of and “English Literature, and ” demonstrating how it has governed our reading of un-English and and “provincial and ” texts. Discussing English, American, Irish, Australian, and other writings, Crawford concentrates on Scottish literature, which furnishes the most extended and acute model of a culture concerned with maintaining and developing its own identity while engaging with England’s linguistic and political dominance.Starting with the eighteenth-century and “Scottish invention of English Literature, and ” Crawford traces the evolution of a distinctively British Literature. This process culminated in Scott who, with Carlyle, encouraged nineteenth-century American writing and left rich legacies both to anthropology and the literary Modernism of Eliot, Pound, and others. This essentially provincial phenomenon of Modernism underwrites even Larkin, as well as such sophisticated post-British and “barbarian and ” poets as Heaney, Harrison, Dunn, Murray, and Walcott.Devolving English Literature makes a major contribution to the current debates regarding English-speaking literary culture and the participation in it of non-English writers, arguing for devolutionary readings, alert to nuances of cultural difference.

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