From the Study of Literature to Literary Studies. The Development of a Discipline

ELIT 425 steps back from reading literature to ask how "literary studies" itself became a university discipline, tracing the shift from eighteenth-century talk of taste and appreciation through the Victorian cultural critics to the institutional battles that put English on the Oxford curriculum. The work is essentially historiographical: you read Hume, Addison, Arnold, Pater and Stephen alongside Atherton and Baldick, and write three term essays that argue your own position on the standard "Rise of English" narrative. It runs as a seminar, and the payoff for upper-year ELIT students is methodological self-awareness — understanding why the field reads the way it does before you specialize further in it.