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234 ENGLISH STUDIES

and develop their aesthetics from them. Otherwise their aesthetics is of no use to
us, for we are in the struggle.’ 30

Contexts for recent work

In this section we look outside of these theoretical discussions to some other
developments by which our own work has been influenced.
One way of evoking the issues would be to say that an important stage, the
moment of Mapping the Field itself, in which there was a considerable and
almost wholly theoretical excitement about the study of literature, has begun to be
left behind. For good reasons, the result is not yet (and may never be) an
equivalently confident map of major names and tendencies. Mapping, after all,
occurred at the intersection of four developments: (1) a confident rejection of the
disdain for contemporary life which marked the late work of Leavis and his
followers, the dominant grouping in the field; (2) the extension of work by
Williams, in particular, to a point where a body of English social and cultural
thought seemed near to its limit and open to movements in other directions; (3)
the arrival, in translation, of a variety of European Marxisms, welcomed at a time
when both liberal gradualist reforming energies and orthodox received Marxisms
seemed to be in stalemate; (4) a sense of possibilities within the academy for the
rethinking of disciplines and the opening up of interdisciplinary work. 31
Literature then became a test case for the excitement of thinking the cultural:
the antispeculative bias of [the liberal] tradition…continues to encourage
submission to what is by preventing its followers from making
connections…. [It is time to] acquire the rudiments of a dialectical
culture…. [Literature] offers a privileged microcosm in which to observe
dialectical thinking at work. 32

In England Williams noted at the time that the drive of such work towards the
difficult yoking of theory to practice seemed also to demand ‘alternative
procedures and styles, as one of the few practical affiliations that could be made
at once and by an act of will’. Later, much restlessness has come from a strong
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sense of unfulfilled promises and expectations. This has not been because that
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work in its English development has been dense, difficult and abstract (though it
has been all these to a degree, rendering it vulnerable to misunderstanding and
neglect) but because of its own lack of connection with cultural and more
general movements inside its own decade. At one level its distance both from the
bidding for a widespread popular conservatism in the 1970s and from other
energies and demands evolving since the late 1960s has been very great. More
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concretely, and in this respect quite unlike most previous literary analysis of any
real substance, it has neither actively informed and helped to constitute an artistic
practice nor inaugurated a new set of directions for teachers in different areas of
education. Further, even before Mapping, the women’s movement accorded a