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Michael Gardiner examines the ideology of the discipline of English Literature, arguing that it is intimately linked with the emergence of the English State, and that it has consequently suppressed the idea of the nation.

Written in an engaging and accessible manner, English Literature in the Age of Chaucer serves as both a lucid introduction to Middle English literature for those coming fresh to the study of earlier English writing, and as a stimulating examination of the themes, traditions and the literary achievement of a number of particulary original and interesting authors. In addition to detailed and sensitive treatment of Chaucer's major works, the book includes chapters on his chief contemporaries, such as John Gower, William Langland and the Gawain-poet. It also examines the often underrated c.

"Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature explores the relationship between ideology and subjectivity surrounding a single class/estate group and its characteristic sins in the context of literary texts influenced by estates satire. This book focuses in depth on both large works by well-known authors and lesser-studied works, including The Canterbury Tales, Piers Plowman, Gower's Mirour de l'Omme, The Book of Margery Kempe, The York Plays, The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, "The Childe of Bristowe," and the Pseudo-Chaucerian "Tale of Beryn." Its approach documents the trajectory of antimercantile ideology under the pressures of the major developments made in economic theory and practice in the later Middle Ages"--

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"--