In rereading this book I am acutely conscious of the degree to which it reflects the interests prevalent in the discipline when it was conceived. My interest in history was (I thought) prompted by an efflorescence of scholarship in the mid and late 1980s on the history of teaching literature, in particular Chris Baldick’s The Social Mission of English Criticism (1983), but also Brian Doyle’s English and Englishness (1989) and others in the Methuen (later Routledge) New Accents series. John Guillory’s Cultural Capital (1993) was crucial for the book, as his earlier essay ‘Canonical and Non-canonical: A Critique of the Current Debate’ had been for the thesis. Pierre Bourdieu remains an influence on my understanding of what might be called the anthropology of academia. These authors, among many others, were reflecting on the conventions of education and their effects on subjectivity, concerns that gelled with my increasing interest in the ways in which institutions shape the terms of research and teaching, often more pleasingly understood as activities that manifest and inculcate a kind of ‘freedom’.
I think it is significant that various histories of English study were produced as part of gaining academic credentials: Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1990) was conceived as doctoral thesis, as was Baldick’s book, as was The English Men and contemporaneous work by Margery Fee and Alan Lawson. It is also significant that these first three projects were done under the direction of supervisors who had called for transformation of the discipline: Edward Said, Terry Eagleton, and Helen Tiffin (respectively). The mood was one for interrogation and change. Such a coincidence now seems to me likely to have reflected the fact that the unconscious seduction for postgraduate students of writing an institutional history was that it would establish the author as someone who had superseded that past. What we failed to see, I think, was that our desire to critique the old brought with it an equal obligation to understand the imperative to be new; to bring to our own time the spirit of critique with which we approached the past. But while attending to history in its common sense 6form (as the past) is routine within literary studies, the use of historical method – attempting to understand the complexity of the relationship of past to present – is rare.
My principal regret in terms of sources for the initial study is that I was not familiar with Tim Rowse’s Australian Liberalism and National Character. This book would have saved me some painful toil. Among Rowse’s arguments, the most important is this: the pervasiveness of the belief that ‘Morality and science are … the privileged province of a disinterested intellectual minority, those unencumbered by neither a thirst for power nor material self-interest’ (30). More specifically, if I had read Rowse, I would have understood a little better the nature and extent of the influence of TH Green and of evangelical thought (see Rowse 44–45). Rowse’s points about the influence of philosophy and theology are developed here, in ways that significantly alter my arguments about the beginnings of the discipline. Had I read Rowse, I would also have known more about the Australian Quarterly, the site of a crucial debate about Australian language which is only touched on here in the final chapter. The other work I should have used is David Walker’s Dream and Disillusion: A Search for Australian Cultural Identity, which would have informed the chapter on Australian literature. More broadly, in terms of approach, the key changes are a realisation that the passing of time in and of itself does not cause change; that authority is intrinsically neither rigid nor flexible, thus what is of interest is the shift between these modes. The understanding that a persuasive historical argument might synthesise disparate forces or might open up contradictions between them underpins these two alterations to the conceptual framework.
These changes are further reflected in the reorganisation of content: the number of chapters has increased from six to eight, and sections have been moved between chapters to reflect the priority given to thematic coherence over chronology and geography. All chapters have been altered to some degree, but the introduction and conclusion have been heavily revised; the central arguments of chapters two, three and five have been altered (implicitly contesting some claims made in The English Men); and some sections of chapters two, three, five and seven are new. 7
I had wanted the book to be read by students, to help them to think about the forces that shape an environment which often seems austere and monumental, its functions and forms in some mysterious way protected from contestation and change. In the main, that hasn’t happened: the main feedback on the first edition came from colleagues, for which I thank them. Since its publication many writers have taken up the arguments and agendas of The English Men, sometimes antagonistically, usually productively. But too many, I feel, have been persuaded by its unfortunate flattening of that history: institutions, individuals, movements in criticism, accounts of which are often one-dimensional. Many of these works can be located using the AustLit bibliography, a tool which in its earliest incarnation helped immeasurably with the initial research. More productively, scholars like Pacita Alexander and Elizabeth Perkins, Louise D’Arcens, Ralph Spaulding and others have offered ‘dissenting views’, broadening our understanding of the history of the discipline in Australia and, perhaps most importantly, complicating our stories of the individuals who are only glimpsed in this book. Other individuals central to the story not of the book but of its author are my parents, Doris and Ray Dale; my sisters Kathryn Pearson and Robyn Dale; and my partner Sarah Ferber. I thank them for their unqualified support.