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Article: Institutionalizing English Literature: The Culture and Politics of Literary Study, 1750-1900.
- Article from:
- Journal of Higher Education
- Article date:
- January 1, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1994 Ohio State University Press. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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RICHARD D. ALTICK, The Ohio State University
In essence, Court's book is a contribution to the growing number of studies that seek to identify the sociological and cultural pressures that have molded the familiar institutions of modern culture. In his view, the nineteenth-century institutionalization of English study occurred exclusively in British academia, where literature, in the broadest sense of "anything well written," was the subject of lecture courses responsive to one or another of the successive waves of ideology that guided the contemporary mind. Earlier, at the University of Edinburgh, Adam Smith (of all people) had taught literature as a means of adding ...