Chapter 3 - Passage Work

Summary

From Walter Raleigh’s The Study of English Literature (1900) to the Newbolt Commission’s report, The Teaching of English in England (1921), the first two decades of the twentieth century saw the consolidation of ‘English’ as a school subject and university discipline, within and against a critical culture that was often international, anti-institutional, dissonant. This chapter tells the parallel and divergent stories of this disciplinary formation and this critical explosion: institutionally, university chairs and formal examinations in English literature were established; counter-culturally, new manifestoes and little magazines blasted past forms of critical discourse. But histories of this criticism have often remained parochial, in both scope and method. Focusing on three figures (Leonard Woolf, Sarojini Naidu, and Caroline Spurgeon), the chapter shows how their various passages – geographical, social, and literary – might offer both an alternative, global, critical history for these decades, and a new sense of how we might tell that history.