Re-Reading English

First Published in 2002. It is easy to see that we are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. It is much less easy to grasp the fact that such change will inevitably affect the nature of those disciplines that both reflect our society and help to shape it. Yet this is nowhere more apparent than in the central field of what may, in general terms, be called literary studies. ‘New Accents’ is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change. To stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study.

Chapter 1 Introduction: The crisis in English studies, Peter Widdowson; Part 1 History, theory, institutions; Chapter 2 The hidden history of English studies, Brian Doyle; Chapter 3 Common sense and critical practice: teaching literature, Tony Davies; Chapter 4 Radical critical theory and English, John Hoyles; Chapter 5 Post-structuralism, reading and the crisis in English, Peter Brooker; Chapter 6 The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Michael Green; Chapter 7 Teaching literature in the Open University, Graham Martin; Chapter 8 ‘English’ and the Council for National Academic Awards, John Oakley, Elizabeth Owen; Part 2 Case studies; Chapter 9 Re-reading the great tradition, Catherine Belsey; Chapter 10 Poetry and the politics of reading, Antony Easthope; Chapter 11 ‘Not for all time, but for an Age’: an approach to Shakespeare studies, Derek Longhurst; Chapter 12 Period studies and the place of criticism, Carole Snee; Chapter 13 Socialist-feminist criticism: a case study, women's suffrage and literature, 1906–14, Wendy Mulford; Chapter 14 Reading the lines: television and new fiction, Peter Humm; Chapter 15 Historicist criticism, David Craig, Michael Egan; Chapter 16 Text and history, Tony Bennett;

Peter Widdowson