Most​ UK-based academics who don’t work at Oxford or Cambridge have at some stage experienced the turbulence of university restructuring. In my case, it happened at the University of Glasgow in 2009. The twenty or so departments and research units in the Faculty of Arts were told to reconfigure themselves as four multidisciplinary super-schools. In the mating dance that followed I popped the question to my colleagues in English literature; but they feared that by joining the History Department they would find themselves ranged alongside Celtic and archaeology in a musty School of Old Stuff. In the end the faculty reorganised itself into a School of Modern Languages and Cultures, a School of Culture and Creative Arts, a School of Humanities and a School of Critical Studies, the last of which included the Department of English Literature, though it could have found a place under any of the four umbrellas. The new School of Critical Studies brought together the former departments of English literature (including creative writing), English language, Scottish literature and theology. English language was largely philological, oriented towards the history of language – Scots and English – as well as to medieval literature and linguistics, while Scottish literature, which had no umbilical connection with English, was the offspring of the former Department of Scottish History.

This example helps bring into focus the contingent character of the subject we call English. The very name of the discipline, as Stefan Collini argues, is slippery with ambiguity, ‘an adjective masquerading as a noun’. What is the missing noun to which English refers: literature, language or both? If both, does English belong with the study of other modern languages and literatures? Is its primary concern with literature in English or with the culture of Englishness? Indeed, if its canon is capacious enough to include Burns, Scott, Yeats, Joyce and Dylan Thomas, why did it never come to be known as ‘British literature’, a description that now sounds oddly stilted? A few 19th-century literary historians – Scots for the most part – happily used that phrase, but since then scruples about terminology have been only fleetingly discernible: Collini points out that the formal rubric of the Honours course at Glasgow in the early 20th century was ‘English (Language, Literature and British History)’. A further puzzle concerns the badging of English as ‘critical studies’: how and when did criticism come to supplant rhetoric, belles-lettres, literary history, philology and a decidedly uncritical brand of aesthetic appreciation as the dominant item in a bundle of loosely related approaches to literature and language?

English is far from alone in its lack of definitional clarity; very few subjects are built on a precise and enduring historical footprint. In their earlier iterations, many of today’s disciplines – from economics to geology – were closely intertwined with theology. Take anthropology, a field not as remote from English as it might appear. The 16th and 17th centuries, as Tricia Ross has shown in an article for the Journal of the History of Ideas, saw the emergence of ‘anthropologia’, a blend of anatomy and theology concerned as much with the human soul as with the body. It didn’t follow a clear pathway to modern academic maturity: 19th-century anthropology took shape under the disparate influences of sociologists, biologists, jurists and classicists. Even today its disciplinary contours are strikingly different in Britain and the United States. Similar divergences were also evident in the most deep-rooted and seemingly traditional subjects: for much of the 20th century, classics at Oxford meant ancient history and philosophy, at Cambridge ancient literature and language.

The history of academic disciplines supplies an antidote to the just-so stories that prevail in most fields of study. Earlier in his career Collini mapped the 19th-century prehistory of political science in That Noble Science of Politics (1983), cowritten with his late colleagues John Burrow and Donald Winch, which rejected the notion that a unidirectional, single-subject narrative was an adequate way of recounting a discipline’s history. The authors instead immersed themselves in unresolved contradictions: between deductive procedures derived from assumptions about human nature and the inductive constraints of historical fact, between aspirations to a value-neutral ‘science’ and practical guidance in the ‘art’ of government. On the one hand, politics as a subject was ‘as empty as a dressmaker’s window, ready to be filled by the latest wave of fashion’; on the other, it bulged with content from a multiplicity of subjects. It seemed to represent a vast shaded area in a Venn diagram, overlapping with economics, sociology, law, history and philosophy. No academic subject, it was implied, had ever been an island unto itself.

Collini’s account of English studies rests on the same premise, and the result is an engrossing multidisciplinary saga of false starts, unlikely combinations and strange might-have-beens. Acutely conscious that he is not the first scholar to venture into this history, Collini includes as an appendix a lively bibliographical essay on his predecessors. This begins, surprisingly, with Stephen Potter, once well known as the author of a series of cod-advice books, including One-Upmanship. Potter was briefly an assistant lecturer in English at Birkbeck College in London, and in 1937 published The Muse in Chains, a semi-subversive account of the ‘routinised dullness’ of teaching the canon. Collini notes the coincidence that another ‘gifted comic writer’, Terry Eagleton, provided the most influential account we have of the rise of English – seen by Eagleton as a pernicious mystification serving the interests of the ruling class – in the first chapter of his bestseller Literary Theory (1983). But Collini chides Eagleton for misrepresenting a central element in his story and observes that the related thesis of Chris Baldick in The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848-1932 (1983) – English as a means of diluting class conflict – also skirts the actual teaching of the subject in the universities. Nor is he convinced by Robert Crawford’s claim that English literature as an academic field was ‘invented’ in the universities of Enlightenment Scotland, where in 1762 Hugh Blair became the first incumbent of the Regius Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh. According to Collini, Crawford’s argument underplays the difference between the generic discipline of rhetoric and the pointedly specific introduction of English literature to the curriculum. Nevertheless, Collini recognises that the way the Scots taught rhetoric – especially the instrumental use of English language materials as aids towards composition – did play a ‘minor and indirect’ role in legitimating ‘the study of modern vernacular texts’.

Collini instead traces the discipline’s direct line of descent to London University (later University College London), established in 1826, which decided to institute a chair of English Literature and Composition, though the appointing committee amended the rubric to English Language and Literature. The first holder, Thomas Dale, applied after being turned down for the chair of Roman Language, Literature and Antiquities at the same institution, and resigned after only two years. Among his successors was R.G. Latham, appointed in 1839, who exemplifies the unexpected affinity that once existed between English and anthropology. Latham’s obsessions were ethnology and philology, especially grammar, with ‘evolutionary morphology’ providing the methodological link between these disparate interests. Latham left the chair in 1845 to enter the medical profession – another point of entry to anthropology. In the 1940s and 1950s, several of F.R. Leavis’s former students became anthropologists, an interest in culture, as Collini notes, ‘easily transferring across disciplinary boundaries’.

The yoking of literature with language was not – at first anyway – a drag on English; the connection served instead to confer prestige on an upstart discipline. Philology was one of the revolutionary sciences of the 19th century, and its discoveries about the origins of the Indo-European family of languages promised to open up exciting vistas of knowledge on the earliest history of humankind. English also came to include the study of related languages and literatures, especially Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse. But the alliance between literary aesthetics and the science of languages was never as comfortable as it was convenient; English was a much more acceptable presence on the syllabus, according to Potter, when ‘made to look like a dead language’. In the late 19th century John Churton Collins, a literary critic and subsequently professor of English literature at the University of Birmingham, lamented the ‘degrading vassalage’ of literature to philology in the ancient universities. To study English philologically as a sprig of the Indo-European language family, he objected, was to operate under the misapprehension that ‘English literature began in the valleys of the Punjab and ended at the birth of Chaucer.’ There was also the peculiar problem of combining the grind of philology with qualitative evaluation. Philip Larkin, an undergraduate in English at Oxford in the early 1940s, got to the nub of his exasperation with Anglo-Saxon literature: ‘I can just about stand learning the filthy lingo it’s written in. What gets me down is having to admire the bloody stuff.’ Anglo-Saxon is still a compulsory element in the English curriculum at Oxford (despite a campaign in the 1990s to abolish it). Cambridge resolved the issue a century ago, when H.M. Chadwick, the professor of Anglo-Saxon, moved his subject into the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology. At this moment in the 1920s Cambridge’s new Faculty of English was an outgrowth from the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages. This point of departure is suggestive in itself. The carving up of literature ‘along national lines’ was no more predestined than a hypothetical academic discipline structured around an international ‘supercanon’ of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton and Goethe.

Aware of the fatuousness of treating a single discipline in isolation, Collini traces the emergence of English in the interplay between academic subjects. The gradual ebbing of classics – once synonymous with education as a whole – opened up ground for the emergence of English. But the relationship also involved an awkward, smothering paternalism. Most of those who played a formative role in the rise of English in the late 19th century had been educated in the classics and thought English needed some of that subject’s ballast to give it learned respectability. The abject deference of English to classical standards, Eagleton believes, was rooted in status anxiety and surfaced in sadomasochism – the problem of ‘how to make it unpleasant enough to qualify as an academic pursuit’. When the heated late 19th-century debate at Oxford over a proposed Honours School in English spilled out beyond the university, E.W. Benson, the archbishop of Canterbury, weighed in to suggest making English an additional component of the degree in classics.

Benchmarking​ the subject against classics persisted into the 20th century. A preoccupation with textual editing and emendation was an obvious symptom of this fixation. The Newbolt Report of 1921 on the teaching of English took the emulation of classics to its highest pitch. The report proposed organising English at university level along the same lines as classics at Oxford, with a preliminary course – Moderations – in literature and language to be followed by ‘an English Literae Humaniores’: the study of English history and philosophy. But instead of English becoming like Greats – English high culture with philosophy at its pinnacle – the curriculum narrowed in most universities, becoming confined to imaginative literature. Cambridge remained a partial exception: under the influence of Arthur Quiller-Couch, the syllabus included a course on ‘The English Moralists’, as well as papers on the ‘History of Criticism’ and ‘Tragedy’, the latter understood philosophically, in the words of I.A. Richards (whose own first degree had been in ‘moral sciences’, i.e. philosophy), as ‘the form under which the mind may most clearly and freely contemplate the human situation’. Basil Willey, Quiller-Couch’s successor as King Edward VII Chair of English Literature, transformed the English Moralists course into a general intellectual history of England between the 17th and 19th centuries. But Cambridge also institutionalised a course in ‘Practical Criticism’ – this had its origin in Richards’s request that his students respond to poems without being told who had written them or when – which paved the way for the dominance of criticism in English departments across the country in the 1950s.

The grand designs of educators and critics offer only a partial and idealised picture of university English. Collini never forgets the bathos intrinsic to academic life: every visionary curriculum is severely dented on collision with the practicalities of assessment and the concerns of the average student. Edward Thring, the headmaster of Uppingham, opposed the idea of an Honours School in English at Oxford precisely because the likely yield for the run-of-the-mill undergraduate would be ‘scraps of philology and lumps of cram’. Indeed, the evolving shape of the subject, as Collini recognises, owed almost as much to the mundane issue of what was examinable as it did to high-flown aspiration. He recovers what students were actually taught and the exam questions they tackled. At Mason College, Birmingham in the late 19th century, where students took an external London degree, the intermediate pass course was made up of 160 lectures – forty on Anglo-Saxon and philology, forty on composition and eighty on English literature. At the University of London in 1859 students were asked: ‘Give the chief facts in the life of Shakespeare until 1603.’ At King’s College London in the 1880s: ‘Make a list of Pope’s chief works in chronological order, with brief descriptions.’

This state of affairs continued through the foundational decades of the discipline in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; unlike today, ‘memorising large amounts of information about literature was what was required rather than a failing to be deplored.’ But we should resist the temptation to sneer. A ‘representative’ question in the matriculation exam for London University in the mid-19th century demanded a sophisticated, quasi-classical command of grammar: ‘Explain the origin of the form of the preterite tense in English, and point out accurately its signification, distinguishing it from the aorist.’ Despite the dominance of unsophisticated literary history at most British universities in the first half of the 20th century, English was far from a soft option. In his memoirs Frank Kermode, another holder of the King Edward VII chair, wrote that his degree programme in English at Liverpool between 1937 and 1940, which included courses in both Latin and Anglo-Saxon, was ‘more strenuous than any now prescribed’.

The function of university English departments was never entirely independent of wider literary taste, or of critical taste-makers in the press, several of whom, as Collini records, ended up holding chairs in the discipline. The mid-20th century, however, seems to mark a change. Before the Second World War the academic canon still ‘formed the staple of lay reading’, but in the second half of the 20th century the role of university English seemed to consist in clarifying classic texts ‘to a generation who were compelled to study them but had difficulty in enjoying them’. In addition, the centrality of poetry gave way to a near exclusive emphasis on prose fiction, which became the staple carbohydrate of most English curricula.

English emerges thoroughly defamiliarised from Collini’s painstaking archival truffling and acute sensitivity to anachronism, but the ‘taken-for-grantedness’ so characteristic of the subject in the mid-20th-century heyday of criticism has long since evaporated, replaced by a conspicuous lack of self-assurance. I sometimes wonder whether academics in English literature have forsaken the primacy of the word for the world – rich in possibilities for impact, outreach and activism – that exists beyond the page. Collini is at pains to stress that his primary purpose is historical, not ‘elegiac’, and the tone is characteristically astringent, but an element of wistfulness inevitably intrudes.