Summary Ian Hunter's early work on the history of literature education and the emergence of English as school subject issued a bold challenge to traditional accounts that have in the main focused on English either as knowledge of a particular field or as ideology. The alternative proposal put forward by Hunter and supported by detailed historical analysis is that English exists as a series of historically contingent techniques and practices for shaping the self-managing capacities of children. The challenge for the (...) field is to advance this historical work and to examine possible implications for English teaching. (shrink)

Summary Although academic disciplines are given to mythologising their own histories, corrective historicisation is no straightforward matter. Anachronisms are most difficult to avoid where our own tacit understandings of the world are used to help structure contexts that are themselves often unstable and indeterminate. This is often the case in attempts to relate agents and propositions to a context of pre-existing problems. Propositions and concepts that are the result of satiric reduction, or unintended consequence, disrupt narrative sequences that lead directly (...) and neatly to present disciplinary identities. (shrink)