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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

"This interdisciplinary collection is a first step in the process of dismantling the imperial and unionist dominance of the discipline of English Literature and building a literary history and national literature of England. The collection brings together some of the best known and most incisive commentators on England, Englishness and English Literature from political and literary fields in order to rethink the relationship between Britain, England and English literary culture. It is premised on the importance of devolution, the uncertainty of the British Union, the place of English Literature within the Union, and the need for England to become a self-determining literary nation. The collection comprises fifteen essays, organised into four parts, moving from political discussions of the form of a devolved or independent England, through a consideration of England in canonical and contemporary literature, to an exploration of the role of the national in English Literature's disciplinary logic"--

The literature of landed vocation in Ontario, 1825-1870 -- Masculine and feminine vocation in fiction of the Canadian West, 1870-1900 -- Emigrant gentlewomen and colonial vocation in Ontario, 1830-1870 -- The anxiety of Englishness and hybrid identity in English-Canadian emigrant writings, 1880-1900

English law and identity: Anglo-Saxon precedent and Plantagenet practice in Athelston -- Guy and Bevis: English exemplars in the Anglo-Saxon past -- A noble history: Trojan heroes and the foundation of Britain -- Hybrid identities and illegitimacy in Of Arthour and of Merlin