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Devolving English Literature questions the manner in which since the eighteenth century an assumed English cultural centre has controlled the way we read. It interrogates the Anglocentricity of the subject 'English Literature' demonstrating how it has governed our reading of unEnglish and 'provincial' texts Discussing English, American, Irish, Australian, and other writings, Crawford concentrates on Scottish literature, which furnishes the most extended and acute model of a culture concerned to maintain and develop its own identity while engaging with England's linguistic and political dominance. Starting with the eighteenth-century 'Scottish invention of English Literature', Crawford traces in Boswell, Burns, and others the evolution of a distinctively British Literature. This process culminated in Scott who, with Carlyle, encouraged nineteenth-century American writing and left rich legacies both to anthropology and to the literary Modernism of Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and MacDiarmid. This essentially provincial phenomenon of Modernism underwrites even Larkin, as well as such sophisticated post-British 'barbarian' poets as Heaney, Harrison, Dunn, Murray, and Walcott
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