Literature and Learning

Stefan Collini's Literature and Learning (Oxford University Press), a history of English literature as a university subject in Britain, is a fine and substantial achievement. His approach, he says, is a "commitment to plenitude of empirical detail", and the book demonstrates a comprehensive grasp of the complex life of the discipline from the late 18th century to its heyday in the Sixties, ranging well beyond the usual focus on Oxford and Cambridge. It is also a delight to read, light on its feet, witty and fresh in its judgements and portraits. * Seamus Perry, New Statesman *
An excellent and comprehensive treatment of the history of Literature in mainstream education in Britain from the 1860s to the 1960s. Collini is... one of our best writers: a meticulous and stylish authority on nineteenth and twentieth-century ideas.... Literature and Learning is a necessary contribution to the study of Literature in British educational history and one accomplished with characteristic erudition and energy. * Tony Roberts, PNReview *
Stefan Collini's monumental work of scholarship is a landmark publication in the field.... Collini's witty, elegant, and entertaining style make[s] such a lengthy tome a very enjoyable read.... What Collini has achieved is to add immensely to our knowledge of English studies, to change and clarify our understanding in numerous ways and to set a new standard of rigorous scholarship for any subsequent account. * Andrew Goodwyn, History of Education *
An engrossing multidisciplinary saga of false starts, unlikely combinations and strange might-have-beens... Aware of the fatuousness of treating a single discipline in isolation, Collini traces the emergence of English in the interplay between academic subjects.... English emerges thoroughly defamiliarised from Collini's painstaking archival truffling and acute sensitivity to anachronism. * Colin Kidd, London Review of Books *
Collini's researches into unexplored corners of intellectual history never cease to amaze.... Spelunking with Collini into the depths of the not-too-distant past always turns out to be a delight and an education. This latest tome is no exception. One emerges from this tour more appreciative, more enlightened, and more critical of what is to be glimpsed aboveground these days.... It's not quite the only book of its kind, but very nearly so. * Brian Campbell, Society *
Rigorous empirical analysis provides a salutary counterweight to inflated claims made for "Eng Lit" yet serves as a foundation for modest, more durable arguments for the continuing value of this academic subject in our period of institutional turbulence.... While Collini is an appreciative guide to the centrality of English studies to British culture at the mid-century, his historical analysis is always critically acute, at times sharp, and no exercise in nostalgia. * Jason Harding, Review of English Studies *
In Professor Collini's hands all is nuance and fine shading... As might be expected from a work that roams unappeasably beyond its 600th page, Literature and Learning addresses its subject in the widest terms... This is a terrific book, which deserves the widest possible circulation. * D.J.Taylor, The Critic *
English, as Stefan Collini observes in his wry and compendious new history of the discipline, Literature and Learning, tends to inspire an extravagant attachment rarely associated with, for example, geography or chemistry.... The subject remains an academic anomaly, a scholarly discipline premised on the acquisition not of knowledge but of aesthetic experience; on the unlikely marriage of (in Collini's happy phrase) "beauty and the footnote". * James Marriot, New Statesman *