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Politics and Value in English Studies

A Discipline in Crisis?

Ian Small author Josephine M Guy author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:11th Jun '09

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Politics and Value in English Studies cover

This 1993 book examines the impact of the 'theory industry' on English studies, and its implications for the future.

This 1993 book examines the ways in which the recent growth of the 'theory industry' in English studies has threatened its status as a discipline, and argues that the attempt by radical critics on both sides of the Atlantic to politicize English studies will have profound consequences.The current debate about the nature of English studies has questioned the status of English as a discipline. In this 1993 book, Josephine Guy and Ian Small set this so-called 'crisis in English' within the larger context of disciplinary knowledge. They examine the teaching of English and literary studies in the United States and Britain, and argue that the explicit attempt by some radical critics on both sides of the Atlantic to politicise the discipline has profound consequences for the nature of English studies. They describe the state of disciplinary knowledge, together with its social and philosophical preconditions; they analyse proposals for reform; and they discuss the ways in which these proposed reforms would affect the three main practices of the discipline - literary criticism, literary history and text-editing. In the process they demystify issues and arguments which have often in the past been obscured by jargon and polemic.

"Josephine Guy and Ian Small are extremely skilled in the arts of analysis and argumentation. Their book is a densely argued inquiry into what happens when people within English studies come to the conclusion that all literature is political, and that all judgments about literature are political as well." John L. Kijinski, English Literature in Transition

ISBN: 9780521112130

Dimensions: 216mm x 140mm x 12mm

Weight: 270g

208 pages