The Constitution of English Literature

Calls upon those working in English literature to see the ongoing underpinning of the discipline by the eighteenth-century unification which was codified by the Burkean constitutional settlement, and to understand this settlement not only in terms of content or canonical line-up, but more fundamentally in terms of English literature's methodologies. It suggests replacing it with a more open-ended, inclusive and internationalist literature, free of the founding imperial assumptions which created a "shadow-constitution."