Abstract
As an academic discipline Comparative Literature came relatively late to Britain. The first lecturer to be appointed in the subject was Glyn Tegai Hughes, who took up his post at Manchester in 1953. With the establishment in the 1960s of the so-called ‘New Universities’ (aka the ‘Plate-Glass Universities’, as opposed to the ‘Red-Brick Universities’, Manchester and the like) things moved faster. The New Universities – Warwick, Sussex, East Anglia (UEA) and Kent in particular – seized the opportunity offered by an organization based on interdisciplinary schools of study rather than traditional departments to approach the teaching of literature in a comparative way. Thus, in Schools of English, the teaching of Old English went out of the window, to be replaced by the study of, for example, the novel as a transnational genre. A typical course might be entitled ‘Novels of Adultery’ and the reading list would consist of books like The Scarlet Letter, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and Effi Briest.
And no longer was a lone lecturer expected to teach Comparative Literature. At UEA two chairs were established in the late 1960s, my own in 1969 and Guido Almansi’s a year or so later. Anthony Thorlby’s followed at Sussex and Susan Bassnett’s at Warwick. The discipline acquired a national organization with the founding of the British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA) at a conference, chaired by Thorlby, held in Norwich in 1975.
At UEA the beginnings were most encouraging. To support the two professors, myself and Almansi, the School of English and American Studies (EAS) and the School of European Studies (EUR) joined forces to appoint junior staff, most of whom went on to distinguished careers at other universities, among them Malcolm Bowie, Clive Scott, Thomas Elsässer, Holger Klein and Michael Hollington. Almansi and I, together with these colleagues, taught an undergraduate course explicitly labelled ‘comparative literature’. Until that time the subject had been considered a postgraduate discipline, but at UEA it was decided to offer a four-year course with a language at honours level and a year abroad. This combination proved attractive to sixth-formers who had a language A level and wished to pursue in tandem English and modern languages rather than, as at most traditional universities, having to choose between them. Some of these undergraduates (in particular Michael Robinson and the late Nicholas Zurbrugg) went on to distinguished careers in academe.
The politics of its coming into being – the professor of English Literature Nicholas Brooke later explained to Michael Mollington – were that historians in EAS would not swallow more students of English literature, for which there was huge demand: they feared being swamped. Comparative Literature was considered a much harder option because one had to study a foreign language seriously and spend a year abroad. So there would not be many applicants, and only a small quota needed to accommodate them, which would pose no threat to the History/Literature balance.
For several years, EAS and EUR had no difficulty filling the 50 places available on their courses, respectively ‘Comp. Lit. EAS’ and ‘Comp. Lit. EUR’ But in the 1980s the climate in UK universities changed. The impact of ‘mai ’68’ – the violent overthrow in France of the old university order – explains in part what happened, but there were other causes. One development which affected first Comp. Lit. EAS and then Comp. Lit. EUR was the sharp decline in the number of school pupils taking French, German or Spanish at A level.
In consequence first EAS, then EUR, reduced their intake, and before long, faced with unstoppable decline, EAS – which in any case from the outset had been the less committed member of the partnership – dropped Comp. Lit. altogether. When Guido Almansi left UEA his chair was not filled, and the contract of the colleague holding the post of French lector in EAS was not renewed. That, needless to say, caused the post-holder considerable resentment, undiminished to this day. But the two posts could no longer be justified: henceforth, insofar as EAS went on teaching foreign texts, the students read them in translation. EUR struggled for a few years to keep its comparative literature course running, but eventually bowed to the inevitable. Those colleagues who had not moved to academic posts elsewhere were redeployed. I was transferred to the chair of French, vacant at the time.
The programme at Warwick finally closed in 2009. The introduction of tuition fees set at £9000 per annum, resulting in irreversible damage to the teaching of the humanities in the United Kingdom, would in any case by now have put paid to undergraduate courses in comparative literature.
Joep Leerssen ends his magisterial study of comparative literature in Britain in 2000, when the rot had set in but the house still stood. His conclusion is therefore relatively upbeat: comparative literature must not be allowed to die, he argues; it has to survive in order to fight the current spread of the ‘new philistinism’ made up of ‘populist neonationalism, anti-intellectualism, fake news, fact-free politics and post-truth memes’ (p. 166). Let us hope he will be justified in that belief.
Matthew Arnold, who coined the term ‘comparative literature’, is the central figure in Leerssen’s story – a towering, very English intellectual whose influence is felt to this day. He had precursors, duly honoured here, like Henry Hallam, and distinguished successors, like H. M. Possnett, whose book Comparative Literature was published as early as 1886. And, rightly, women like Edna Purdie, Enid Starkie and Lilian Furst figure prominently in Leerssen’s narrative.
This is a study of the rare kind of which it can truthfully be said that it is definitive: the description fits Leerssen’s book perfectly. To those still living who launched comparative literature in the new universities some 50 years ago it will come as a happy reminder of an exciting time of innovation and change which they were fortunate to have been part of. To those of a later generation it will reveal that what happened in the 1960s did not emerge from nowhere: a long and honourable history, ably explored by Professor Leerssen, led up to it.