Robin Peel

Jeanne Gerlach

Annette Patterson

The impact and content of English as a subject on the curriculum is once more the subject of lively debate. Questions of English sets out to map the development of English as a subject and how it has come to encompass the diversity of ideas that currently characterise it. Drawing on a combination of historical analysis and recent research findings Robin Peel, Annette Patterson and Jeanne Gerlach bring together and compare important new insights on curriculum development and teaching practice from England, Australia and the United States. They also discuss the development of teacher training, highlighting the variety of ways in which teachers build their own beliefs and knowledge about English.

Aesthetics, Democracy and the Formation of Subject

Questions of English

Daniel Maudlin

Taking a multidisciplinary approach to the complex cultural exchanges that took place between Britain and America from 1750 to 1900, The Materials of Exchange examines material, visual, and print culture alongside literature within a transatlantic context. The contributors trace the evolution of Anglo-American culture from its origins as a product of the British North Atlantic Empire through to its persistence in the post-Independence world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While transatlanticism is a well-established field in history and literary studies, this volume recognizes the wider diversity and interactions of transatlantic cultural production across material and visual cultures as well as literature. As such, while encompassing a range of fields and approaches within the humanities, the ten chapters are all concerned with understanding and interpreting the same Anglo-American culture within the same social contexts. The chapters integrate the literary with the material, offering alternative and provocative perspectives on topics ranging from the child-made book to representations of domestic slaves in literature, by way of history painting, travel writing, architecture and political plays. By focusing on cultural exchanges between Britain and the north-eastern maritime United States over nearly two centuries, the collection offers an in-depth study of Britain’s relationship with a single region of North America over an extended historic period. Contributors have resisted the temptation to prioritize the relationship between New England and England in particular by placing this association within the contexts of Atlantic exchanges with other northeastern states as well as with the South, the Caribbean and Scotland. Intended for researchers in literature, visual and material culture, this collection challenges single-subject boundaries by redefining transatlantic studies as the collective examination of the complex and interrelated cultural t

The Materials of Exchange between Britain and North East America, 1750-1900

Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics explores the relationship between Plath's writing and Cold War discourses and argues that the time (1960-1963), the place (England), and the global politics are important factors for us to consider when we consider the rhetoric of Plath's later poetry and fiction. Based on fresh readings arising from new research, this study argues that Plath should not be depoliticized, and examines her writing alongside the discourses of the period as expressed in newspaper reporting, magazines, and BBC radio. In contrasting her relationship with institutions in America in the 1950s with her responses in England to church, the American arms industry, the National Health Service, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament it becomes clear that the process of cultural defamiliarization causes Plath to question the model of the individual artist divorced from society, a model of the writer that had previously seemed so attractive.

Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics

Writing Back

A collection problematizing American and British intellectual transactions

Transatlantic Traffic And (Mis)Translations

"The study emphasizes the crucial role that Wharton's contact with Europe had on her writing, and the significance intellectually and politically of her relationship with Morton Fullerton and her reading of his books on politics. It locates Wharton in her period, surrounded as she was by discourses which called for political and social change, change which an outlook that Peel calls "American Toryism" made her reluctant to embrace. Her love of motorcars and her excitement about other technological developments such as aeroplanes was inspired by a feeling of exclusivity and not the democratization of culture, which she feared and condemned. France, England, Italy, and America formed the quartet of countries that contained the best and worst of culture, and Peel emphasizes how ironical it was that a writer whose ideological beliefs endorsed the importance of home, roots, and tradition should have spent so much of her life as a restless, apparently rootless traveler."--BOOK JACKET.

Robin Peel

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