'Cultural history would refuse nothing' (Catherine Belsey)
'As we all know, English is dead' (Gary Day)

My aim is to review recent debates about value in relation to literary texts, and about the value of literary study, and consider these in relation to the compromise over literary value current in the university English curriculum in the United Kingdom. While the intensified interest in literary theory has had far-reaching implications for methods of studying literature, and while certain areas of the curriculum (in terms of the texts studied) have changed radically, others have altered little in the second half of the twentieth century. However, the requirements of 'taught texts' have altered. The kind of text which is currently valued widely is that which is most productive - a term to which I shall return. The paper also assesses the effect of market forces and student preferences in a world of "academic capitalism" (the term is Harold Fromm's). I want also to consider the relationship between value and two other concepts: mastery and repetition.

Modern literary studies have always been implicated in questions of literary value. The university curriculum at mid-century was seen primarily in terms of selected texts from literary history; something has to be taught, after all, and one way of radically assessing university English was to revalue the syllabus. Ian MacKillop and Richard Storer's archaeology among F. R. Leavis's papers reinforces if anything our sense of his magisterial approach, dictating a nuanced curriculum even to those who might be on their way to study at Downing College, and repeating the process in his undergraduate tutorials (1995: 53-70). The American poet and critic Yvor Winters acted similarly in presenting his history of the lyric poem Forms of Discovery: there were surprising apotheoses (such as Frederick Goddard Tuckerman and Robert Bridges) and summary dismissals:

Notoriously, Leavis refused to set out his principles of judgement, even when challenged to do so by René Wellek. For Leavis, such an invocation of first principles 'suggests a false idea of the procedure of the critic' (1948: 31). Winters was happy to state in a few words the principles of his assessments - easy to state, hard to live up to or apply (1995: xii-xv). Their different views of the value of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins make a fascinating study in judgement and principles of valuation, about which I have written elsewhere (1974) but from the perspective of the year 2000 their very stress on judgement appears antique and out of harmony with the spirit of contemporary literary education. 'What you decide to examine,' writes Terry Eagleton in a relaxed account of the place of evaluation in the contemporary curriculum, 'depends very much on the practical situation. It may seem best to look at Proust and King Lear, or at children's television programmes or popular romances' (1983: 210).

What of Leavis's great competitor (as he was seen in the 1960s), Northrop Frye? His dismissal of the necessity for thevaluation of texts cleared the way for his proto-structuralist account of the canon in Anatomy of Criticism. But even at the time there was a lingering question about Frye's attitude to evaluation. Where did all this literary material in Anatomy of Criticism come from? Frye's reading had been more than extensive, as well as highbrow in the extreme and he was confident in drawing the lines between popular literature and his canon. It was as though 'nature' had decided upon his corpus of works - or those generations of readers who had continued to breathe life into and through them. The politics of canon-formation (even if John Guillory has recently sounded a note of caution about assumptions about such politics [1993]) are hardly acknowledged by Winters, Leavis or Frye; though their standpoints on the need for judgement are diametrically opposed, the literary material is 'there' to be assessed, re-ranked or arranged into genres, and that's the end of it. The common pursuit of true judgement and anatomy may be at odds, but Frye's work on genre certainly did make assumptions about what 'a literary text' meant and the rules it operated by.

In the 1980s, theorists and those tracing the past and future of university English and Cultural Studies showed a renewed interest in 'value'. The word has always been taken in a number of senses, however. In a footnote near the end of Theory and Cultural Value, his excellent survey of the question of value and its theorists, Steven Connor refers to the 1988 conference on 'Cultural Value' at Birkbeck College, University of London:

There might be two reactions to this comment. The first is that it was surprising that there were not more divisions in the readings of the term 'cultural value'. The term might be read, for example, in terms of: (a) the evaluation of and discrimination between cultural artefacts; (b) the value of the cultural in the special sense of 'canonical and popular arts' - as opposed to the political, the economic, the scientific; (c) cultural value as assertively opposed to artistic or literary value, as cultural studies might be opposed to literary studies; (d) the place of evaluation or canon-making in the life of a culture. The fact that in Birkbeck in 1988 these issues were seen primarily through the postcolonial and the postmodern is testimony to the revived interest in the ethical dimensions of post-structuralism and deconstruction, and the way that it has become impossible to think of national (or international) cultures - or literatures - without invoking postcolonialism.

The second observation would be that for those involved as students or teachers within the 'English' curriculum, all the foregoing aspects of 'value' are operative within a day's work. They influence considerations within genre study, period study, and 'close reading'. They are likely to arise around any topics which link literary and cultural studies, or in attempts to sustain (or undermine) workable definitions of 'the literary' as a category, or in choosing theoretical paradigms, or reflecting on the nature of reading and language.

A number of studies of value as it relates to literature appeared between 1988 and 1993, such as Barbara Herrnstein Smith's Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Literary Theory in 1988, Frank Kermode's History and Value in 1989, Steven Connor's Theory and Cultural Value in 1992, and Josephine Guy and Ian Small's Politics and Value in English Studies in 1993. Like Smith's account, Guy and Small's admirable discussion of the place of value in a number of academic disciplines suggests that there is no reason to see literature or literary studies as having a particular problem with notions of value (1993: 97). Nevertheless, Barbara Herrnstein Smith's thesis, as suggested in the title of her book, is that while evaluation is unavoidable, it cannot be objective. We must accept that what we are doing 'when we make an explicit value judgement of a literary work is (a) articulating an estimate of how well that work will serve certain explicitly defined functions (b) for a specifically defined audience (c) who are conceived of as experiencing the work under certain implicitly defined conditions' (1988:13).

This brings to mind the late Antony Easthope's familiar question about the 'good' work of literature, which might figure as a supplement to Herrnstein Smith's stipulations: we must ask (d) 'what is it good for?' In practice, and in the curriculum, this version of the question is hard to answer. 'Well, good for lots of different things - and the more things it's good for, the more likely it is to be . . . good' is not the answer, one infers, that would please Easthope. It is one thing for Martin Amis perceptively to note that Nabokov's novels 'allow laughter its full complexity and range . . . admiration, relief, exasperation, stoicism, hysteria, embarrassment, disgust and cruelty' (1993) with the positive evaluation that implies, but harder to answer the Herrnstein Smith/Easthope challenge listed as a, b, c, d above. Do Nabokov's novels provoke liberating or consoling laughter? Is the laughter, in the implicitly-approving terms of many English exam questions, 'radical'? Is it 'carnivalesque'? Or complacent? What kind of 'explicitly-defined function' do I (as a critic) want the novels to serve? Does Martin Amis's use of the word 'allowing', with its overtones of opening up, freeing and permission, signal a liberal humanist agenda? Finally, is his implicit approval of 'complexity and range' just common sense, or is it a late twentieth-century rubbing of the reader's hands at all those goods on display, and thus infected by consumerism? If I approve of the 'explicitly defined function' (here, producing lots of different kinds of laughter) and the text appears to promote it, is it therefore good? And can we really decide what a specifically defined audience in explicitly defined conditions will take from, say, Nabokov's Pnin? At this level of specificity such questions start to sound satirical. It is easier to critique the implied values of a critical statement (such as Amis's here) than to assert the principles which should guide an act of evaluation. Even the preliminary definition implied in talking about a 'literary work' can be seen as tendentious. It shifts it out of the religious, political or philosophical arena into the aesthetic. We might read Macaulay's History as literature. Or in those courses more popular in the USA than the UK, one might enrol on ENG2004: 'The Bible as Literature'. For some, this adoption of a special aesthetic realm called 'the literary' is self-defeating, isolationist, absurd. Much better to take a step back from that implicit act of evaluation and accept that one is engaged in textual studies. The great competitor to the English curriculum in recent times has been Cultural Studies. (I myself work in a School of Cultural Studies.) Catherine Belsey's proposal for a redefined discipline of 'Cultural History' substitutes an act of political commitment for the act of aesthetic judgement and has little interest in traditional issues of value: 'cultural history would refuse nothing' and 'would have no interest in ranking works in order of merit' (quoted in Small and Guy 1993: 48). Cultural Studies is fully committed to the idea of textual study as historicizing (in the sense of differentiating past readings from those of the present) and involved in ideological critique. Its scepticism about the ability of literary studies to define aesthetic value convincingly suggested that English's tenure as an academic discipline was drawing to a close. It is true that the methodology of cultural studies and cultural criticism has had an impact on the English curriculum, both in the choice of texts and genres and in methodologies such as new historicism.

English is dead, but only as in early reports of the demise of Mark Twain. It has benchmarked standards, and such an unremitting flow of students that the 2000 AGM of its Subject Association complained about increased class sizes and teaching hours. In 1983 Terry Eagleton claimed that 'English' could not define its subject matter (i.e. literature) and didn't know what it was meant to be doing with it anyway (1983: 1-55). In 1997 HEQC in its Graduate Standards Programme Final Report (1997:1) emphasised 'the desirability of comparability, clarity and explicitness with regard to the level, purposes and standards of academic programmes' and appeared to be satisfied with these in English, though it had pointed out in its HEFCE Subject Overview Report for English 1996 that English was a subject characterized by its diversity. The Research commissioned in 1997 by the Quality Assurance Agency and carried out by the Subject Association the Council for College and University English (CCUE), however, found that 'there is already substantial common ground within the discipline about what the assumptions underlying . . . shared judgements actually are. In this respect the diversity of the curriculum in English masks significant agreement on the definition of the core skills and threshold standards expected of English undergraduates' (1997: 1). There is agreement on skills and standards, but diversity in the curriculum. In terms of a discussion of value, two main areas of interest arise from this report. They relate to issues of (a) the value of academic literary study as an activity; and (b) value judgements about certain texts and the desirability of studying them.

Somewhat surprising is the extent to which a skills-based approach to the subject has been adopted. 45% of respondents thought that it was essential for graduates in English to have a knowledge of the canon of English literature (a low proportion? But the use of the definite article may have made some respondents sceptical), 74% wanted them to know the historical and cultural contexts of literature, but 92% wanted them to have writing skills, 38% IT skills, 53% oral skills. Skills in evaluation may be buried in various other "desired attributes for graduates in English" (subject methodologies, analytical skills. critical reasoning) but they do not appear in their own right. This is perhaps to be expected. In the UK's 'Subject Benchmarking for English' document published by the QAA after extensive consultation within the university community, however, there is an unreconstructed sentence within the desired 'aims' of the subject, that it should foster an appreciation of the imaginative power of literature. While the term imagination has a long and respectable history within literature, it is suggestive of the diversity of English to come across it there, among the learning outcomes and routine stipulations.

The curriculum in terms of genres and periods at first sight looks established and secure. The most common compulsory literature course in UK universities is 'Shakespeare', closely followed by Literary Theory. One might have guessed the second, third and fourth-- Romantic literature, Victorian fiction, Renaissance poetry and drama, and Modernist literature. In the list of the most popular options, women's writing is way out in front, together with expanding areas such as Postcolonial literature and terror/gothic. Notable changes over the last thirty years involve the rise of women's writing as an academic subject, the establishment of literary theory, and the popularity of highly-theorised postcolonial studies and of courses which break down the boundaries between popular literature and the canon. It can easily be seen that value is debated as a matter of course in all these areas. The very revision of the curriculum that they represent means that issues of social justice, representative democracy and political radicalism are inseparable from the curriculum. It provides a context where literary studies is associated, in popular parts of its syllabus, with a liberationist ethic.

Engagement with such a curriculum is not just, in Bourdieu's terms, the accumulation of cultural capital (1977); this is an arena where ideological critique can meet personal and ethical development and a revived commitment to affective criticism. In more negative terms, it can be an area for self-righteous or accusatory stances: Defoe is a racist, Wordsworth is not a socialist and Philip Larkin is culpable on most grounds. A materialist criticism,' says Terry Eagleton, reinforcing Walter Benjamin's strictures on culture and barbarism in a passage noted by Josephine Guy and Ian Small, 'is one which seeks to . . .remind culture of its criminal parentage' (1990: 32-3). In this context, the recent work of John Gilmore in researching the anglophone literature of the Caribbean in the 18^th century is of interest.

In his new edition of James Grainger's long poem The Sugar Cane (1999), Gilmore argues for a new look at such work not just in terms of how it reminds readers of the 'criminal parentage' of the colonial tradition (Grainger was a sugar plantation owner), but through a rich methodology of cultural history (the surprisingly rich cultural environment within which the poem was written, the readership for such material in the Caribbean and in Europe) and literary history (the adaptation of English - and classical - poetic models to the writing of a Caribbean Georgic). Gilmore also looks at how far the poem can be judged on aesthetic grounds, given its ideological significance as 'white writing'. His introduction points out that, with some honorable exceptions, Grainger's The Sugar Cane was been elided from accounts and anthologies of Caribbean poetry. The poem is certainly not what many might expect of 'Barbadian writing'. Yet it calls for more than a condemnation, or to be fuel for what Michael Bell has called the 'increasing assumption among students of the humanities that ideological exposure is the essential function of criticism' (1999: 253).

Ideological critique and ideological exposure are related to a process that could be called productivity. The term has a certain irony when one comes to it from a reading of The Sugar Cane. Yet the idea of productivity is inseparable from many teachers' and students' view of value. Literary texts are valuable and will remain in the curriculum in as far as they have been interestingly written about. Kipling's Kim has been reclaimed for pleasure as well as politics by Edward Said; Frankenstein by Ellen Moers, Anne K. Mellor and others; Wide Sargasso by Gayatri Spivak; 'The Purloined Letter' by Jacques Lacan, fairy tales by Bruno Bettelheim and Jack Zipes. The synonym for value becomes 'a productive site for reading', literature is a problem and 'great' is displaced by 'problematic'. This is often how previously marginal texts will find their way on to the syllabus and be read repeatedly, for repetition is another key to value in literary education. 'Repetition is reality and it is the seriousness of life . . . repetition is the daily bread which satisfies with benediction' writes Søren Kierkegaard (1964:29). To be valued, a text has to be taken up by literary study again and again in different contexts. By turning up on different parts of a course (as women's writing, as Victorian, as susceptible to psychoanalytic reading, as a colonial or postcolonial text for example) texts gain a patina of value. Their dispersive quality becomes the equivalent of chemical valency.

Bram Stoker's Dracula is one of the most interesting examples of literary productivity within the curriculum. Forty years ago it tended to be discussed by critics with a speculative interest in the fringes of the curriculum, such as Devendra P. Varma (1957). Its current popularity as a subject for academic criticism and for study by students, is remarkable. Admittedly, it does contain its own metaphor of vitality and possessiveness, a villain who transports himself from an earlier era to the very heart of modernity to fascinate those who begin (like Mina Harker) by being sceptical, but end by being fascinated. Like Dracula himself, the text seems determined not be killed off. Dracula has benefited from the millennial interest in anything from the 1890s, but its main virtue as an item in the curriculum is that it allows itself to be read differently in numerous different contexts. As Ken Gelder has exhaustively shown (1994:65-85), it is remarkably productive - can be used to pour out readings like the bottomless jug of the fairy tale. As the meeting-place of a multitude of discourses, from feminism to economics to imperialism, immigration and 'reverse colonization', from psychiatry to the occult, public health and technology, it is rich evidence of a fearful culture 'mastering' its fears by staking Dracula. It has no wisdom to convey, only gestures. Just as Dracula sought to control and master contemporary phobias, so its unconscious appeals to the paradoxical demands of the contemporary curriculum. It is an invitation to critical mastery but eventually uncontrollable, for if deconstructive interpretation is, as Steven Connor says, 'an open and transactive process, an interminable and unoriginated following through of traces, and traces of traces,' then 'the arrival at an evaluation always represents a more or less artificial fixing or arrest of that process' (1992: 192). 'There are many Draculas,' writes Ken Gelder, 'which compete with each other for attention in the academic/student marketplace' (1994: 65). Gelder is acknowledging that the curriculum is big business, in the UK as well as in the USA. The increasing number of popular literary genres studied as part of the English curriculum is driven by their popularity among the student consumers as well as by their amenability to theorised readings.

Is Dracula a valuable text? As a popular novel it tends to be read in terms of the desires of its audience. Its 'political unconscious' can be diagnosed and in the process mastery must pass to the critic rather than the writer. Harold Fromm's judgement in Academic Capitalism and Literary Value on this kind of reading is that:

The opposite to Fromm's vision of critical insolence is the idea of recognised value seen as the end of study: a spiritual as well as an intellectual discipline. This concept is apparently archaic but has a tenacious life, not least among students. Here hermetic texts are proposed by adepts (teachers) and are in turn found difficult, even rebarbative, by the student. But the great work (often one from the past) has a value which those who approach with humility eventually apprehend or even share in through a discipline of repeated reading and dialogue. In this model there may be 'transferable skills' involved in the process, but the incorporating of the book into one's imagination is more valuable. There has to be some leeway for scepticism, even in this model. For example, why should a person from Toxteth want to internalize right-wing modernism through The Waste Land? But some texts stand in judgement on the reader, as distinct from that kind of valuing leading to 'revaluation', or 'new bearings', where the citadel of letters is levelled for each generation of students to rebuild again from scrupulously sifted and weighed stones. Michael Bell, in an essay quoted earlier, revisits Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man as an argument in this spirit, for the moral value of aesthetic experience:

As might be expected, Yvor Winters expresses such a view of study, for example in his poem 'Time and the Garden':

And this is like that other restlessness
To seize the greatness not yet fairly earned,
One which the tougher poets have discerned -
Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne,
Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,
And spaced by many years, each line an act
Through which few labor, which no men retract.
The passion is the scholar's heritage,
The imposition of a busy age,
The passion to condense from book to book
Unbroken wisdom in a single look,
Though we know well that when this fix the head,
The mind's immortal, but the man is dead. (1969:159)

Both Schiller and Winters regard with unease the idea that the aesthetic value of the literary work should be secondary to the political, or that in the act of reading, imperatives of justice and emancipation take precedence. This is not to say that Winters is an advocate of art for art's sake, or even of aesthetics, for his theory is determinedly moral and he is sceptical about a notion of 'beauty' that can encompass literature, painting, scupture and music (1967: xi).

Within a single programme of study, students may take courses where trust in value is paramount, alongside those where aesthetic value is put in abeyance in favour of new historicist or structuralist agendas. In students' experience, such approaches are the only refuge from persistent evaluation: evaluation in reviewing, in reading (or deciding whether to read on), in authors' revision of texts; in the marking of their creative writing, in editorial decisions. But, however pervasive issues of value may be, they are ambivalently regarded within the curriculum.

The case of Toni Morrison is an interesting one here. Hers is a rich body of work, whose value has been recognized by the award of the Nobel Prize. Carl Plasa's affronted reaction to attempts to diagnose her political unconscious suggests that such interventions are sometimes treated as lèse-majesté (1998: 25-31). Alan Kennedy confidently acknowledges deconstruction's part in the recognition of the value of writing such as Morrison's: 'Deconstruction is a literary-critical . . . decentring that has contributed to a major change resulting, for instance, in the recent awarding of the Nobel prize to a Third World writer' (quoted in Connor 1992: 197). Beloved is valued as an intervention in cultural politics, and as (in Morrison's own words) 'a kind of literary archaeology' aimed at altering its readers' sense of history. It also, as Peter Brooker and Peter Widdowson point out as they assemble a diversity of readings of the novel, 'contains much of its own theory, or perhaps more to the point, encourages theoretically informed criticism in its contemporary commentators' (1996: 391). Textually dense and intriguing and found moving by many, it has come to seem the paradigmatic text of the late-twentieth-century curriculum. (Jazz is equally interesting and highly original, but in terms of the curriculum a story of the way a middle-aged couple 'get over' his murder of his young lover is never going to meet the requirements of the target audience.) Brooker and Widdowson, however, end their introduction to essays on Beloved with a very proper question which also carries overtones of unease: 'How and why', they ask their student readers, 'is Beloved so valued? Is it possible to articulate convincingly evaluative judgements? Should it be?' (1996: 392).

If I read their question correctly, its unease stems from the way value judgements have been associated with a denigration of popular culture, with a preoccupation with 'ranking works in order of merit' (as Catherine Belsey put it earlier), with an encouragement of feeble-minded affective responses (and in turn a model of reader/author/character identification), or even with the tendency I mentioned earlier to make Beloved the paradigmatic 'black' text of the curriculum. To those outside the academic English community, however, Brooker and Widdowson's questions might seem puzzling. Have they themselves not valued Beloved by including it as an exemplary text in A Practical Reader in Contemporary Literary Theory? Has Morrison not won the Nobel Prize for Literature? But this is to point up the gap between the public understanding of the English Studies curriculum (and the place of value within it), and that of its practitioners. There is a paradox here. From outside, the curriculum is often seen as an Arnoldian space where the best that has been written is examined in terms of technique, language and history. The prestige it carries, and affords its graduates, is based partly on that canon and partly on the fact that (almost by coincidence) literary study, with its close attention to language and discriminations, is an excellent gymnasium for developing 'problem-solving skills', 'oral skills' and a whole set of employment-related abilities. It draws in students (mature students as well as those coming from A level) on similar kinds of premises. 'I love literature' is a UCAS-form platitude that may endure as an unspoken commitment, but not often as an overt formulation, in more knowing undergraduates. The curriculum does not exist to make students enjoy literature more, but to problematize it. The untheorized pleasure is not worth enjoying. University English likes to see its curriculum as (more or less subtly) subversive, and, as I said earlier, it has an honourable place in cultural politics in terms of liberationist aesthetics and ideological cultural critique. Every so often an academic speaks subversively of the established hierarchy of value, to astonished press reaction (thus Terry Eagleton notoriously becomes the student of bus tickets, Terence Hawkes and Gary Taylor become advertised as the Professors of Shakespeare who don't enjoy his work, and Mick Jardine provokes his audience with his version of 'Killer Shakespeare' [1997]).

The existing situation can be seen as compromise or compromised. On the one hand, traditional notions of value have been good to 'English' in terms of recruitment and funding. On the other hand, the term is seen variously as slippery, problematic, pragmatic, irrelevant, crucial, reactionary. A similar paradox surrounds the 'productive text' on the curriculum. On the one hand, ideological critique and formalist analysis seek to determine its cultural force and the objective features of its construction. On the other hand, the appeal of the 'productive text' is in its ability to facilitate a proliferation of 'theorized readings', or to magnetize a cluster of (con)texts in the new historicist tradition, or to just go on being repeated year after year in different modules. English is more than a government-benchmarked, quality-controlled, cost-effective producer of skilled workers in the postindustrial capitalist economy. But productive texts must go on producing; momentum must be maintained. In some respects fears about the naturalizing of literary theory - that its force would be both creative and neutralized; necessary to invigorate the discipline but also instrumental and consumerist, producing a 'choice' of approaches that students can select from - have proved justified. The thirty or so available guides to literary theory, many of them triumphs of explication and intelligence, are in danger of having the forces of their critique of earlier models of study dispersed in the wealth of productive 'approaches' they appear to endorse.

Works Cited

Amis, Martin (1992) 'Low Hum and Little Lo', pp. 24-35, in The Independent on Sunday 25 October.

Bell, Michael (1999) 'The Metaphysics of Modernism: Aesthetic Myth and the Myth of the Aesthetic', pp. 238-56, in The Arts and Sciences of Criticism, ed. David Fuller and Patricia Waugh, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1977) Distinction: Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Brooker, Peter, and Peter Widdowson (1996) A Practical Reader in Contemporary Literary Theory Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996.

Connor, Steven (1992) Theory and Cultural Value Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

Council for College and University English (CCUE) (1997) The English Curriculum: Diversity and Standards.

Eagleton, Terry (1983) Literary Theory: An Introduction Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

Easthope, Anthony (1991) Literary into Cultural Studies Routledge, London and New York.

Fromm, Harold (1991) Academic Capitalism and Literary Value The University of Georgia Press, Athens and London.

Frye, Northrop. (1967) Anatomy of Criticism Princeton University Press, New York.

Gelder, Ken (1994) Reading the Vampire Routledge, London and New York.

Grainger, James (1999) The Sugar Cane, ed. John Gilmore, Athlone Press, London.

Guillory, John (1993) Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Guy, Josephine, and Ian Small (1993) Politics and Value in English Studies: A Discipline in Crisis? Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

HEFCE (1995) Subject Overview Report: Quality Assessment of English, Bristol.

HEQC (1997) Graduate Standards Programme: Final Report and Recommendations, Bristol.

Jardine, Mick (1997) 'Killer Shakespeare', Paper presented at the CCUE Conference, 'Difference and Diversity', University of Loughborough, September 3-5.

Kermode, Frank (1989) History and Value Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Kierkegaard, Søren (1954) Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology, trans. Walter Lowrie, Anchor Books, New York.

Leavis, F. R. (1948) 'Literary Criticism and Philosophy: A Reply', pp. 30-40, in The Importance of Scrutiny, ed. Eric Bentley, New York University Press, New York.

MacKillop, Ian (1995) F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism, Allen Lane: The Penguin Press, London

MacKillop, Ian, and Richard Storer, eds (1995) F. R. Leavis: Essays and Documents, Sheffield Academic Press, Sheffield.

Plasa, Carl, ed. (1998) Icon Critical Guides: 'Beloved', Icon Books, Cambridge.

Ringrose, Christopher (1974) 'F. R. Leavis and Yvor Winters on G. M. Hopkins', pp.32-42, in English Studies 55/1.

Smith, Barbara Herrnstein (1988) Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Literary Theory Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Varma, Devendra P., (1987) The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England, Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration and Residuary Influences (1957), Scarecrow Press, London.

Winters, Yvor (1967) Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English The Swallow Press, Chicago.

Winters, Yvor, and Kenneth Fields, eds. (1969) Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English The Swallow Press, Chicago.

COMMENTS

If you would like to send comments to Working Papers, please e-mail s.l.earnshaw@shu.ac.uk Comments will be published at the end of January, and the authors' replies at the end of February.

If you would like to contact Chris Ringrose directly, his e-mail address is: CHRIS.RINGROSE@NORTHAMPTON.AC.UK