Michael G. Malouf

Uncovering the role of literature, late imperialism, and the rise of new models of internationalism as integral to the invention of Global English, this book focuses on three key figures from the “Vocabulary Control Movement” - C.K. Ogden, Harold Palmer, and Michael West - who competed for market share for their respective language teaching systems - Basic English, the Palmer Method, and the New Method - through battles over word lists and teaching methods in the 1920s and 30s. Drawing on archives from the Carnegie Corporation and considering language teaching in eight global sites, this book analyzes how a series of conferences in New York and London resolved their conflicts and produced a consolidated, international standard form of English. As a postcolonial approach to the development of the field of English Language Teaching, it reveals how these language debates were proxy battles over an idealized global subject: an urban, secular, consumer moving seamlessly between the tribal and global, speaking both mother tongues and an international lingua franca, Global English. Featuring analysis of the primary texts of each of the three key figures in this book as well as close readings of their readers, which featured adaptations of well-known literary texts from writers like Poe, Dickens, Wordsworth, Milton and Wells, it recovers a neglected history of English as it was redefined as an international language through anti-colonial resistance in the peripheries and transatlantic power struggles in the metropole during the interwar period.

Uncovering the role of literature, late imperialism, and the rise of new models of internationalism as integral to the invention of Global English, this book focuses on three key figures from the “Vocabulary Control Movement” - C.K. Ogden, Harold Palmer, and Michael West - who competed for market share for their respective language teaching systems - Basic English, the Palmer Method, and the New Method - through battles over word lists and teaching methods in the 1920s and 30s. Drawing on archives from the Carnegie Corporation and considering language teaching in eight global sites, this book analyzes how a series of conferences in New York and London resolved their conflicts and produced a consolidated, international standard form of English. As a postcolonial approach to the development of the field of English Language Teaching, it reveals how these language debates were proxy battles over an idealized global subject: an urban, secular, consumer moving seamlessly between the tribal and global, speaking both mother tongues and an international lingua franca, Global English. Featuring analysis of the primary texts of each of the three key figures in this book as well as close readings of their readers, which featured adaptations of well-known literary texts from writers like Poe, Dickens, Wordsworth, Milton and Wells, it recovers a neglected history of English as it was redefined as an international language through anti-colonial resistance in the peripheries and transatlantic power struggles in the metropole during the interwar period.

Despite their prominent place in twentieth-century literature in English, novelists and poets from Ireland and the anglophone Caribbean have long been separated by literary histories in which they are either representing a local, nationalist tradition or functioning within an international movement such as modernism or postcolonialism. Redressing this either/or framework, Michael Malouf recognizes an integral history shared by these two poetic and political traditions, arising from their common transatlantic history in relation to the British empire and their common spaces of migration in New York and London. In examining these cross-cultural exchanges, he reconsiders our conception of transatlantic space and offers a revised conception of solidarity that is much more diverse than previously assumed. Offering a new narrative of cultural influence and performance, this work specifically demonstrates the formative role of Irish nationalist discourse - expressed in the works of Eamon de Valera, George Bernard Shaw, and James Joyce - in the transnational political and aesthetic self-fashioning of three influential Caribbean figures: Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, and Derek Walcott. It provides both an innovative historical and literary methodology for reading cross-cultural relations between two postcolonial cultures and a literary and political history that can account for the recent diversity of the field of anglophone world literature.

Despite their prominent place in twentieth-century literature in English, novelists and poets from Ireland and the anglophone Caribbean have long been separated by literary histories in which they are either representing a local, nationalist tradition or functioning within an international movement such as modernism or postcolonialism. Redressing this either/or framework, Michael Malouf recognizes an integral history shared by these two poetic and political traditions, arising from their common transatlantic history in relation to the British empire and their common spaces of migration in New York and London. In examining these cross-cultural exchanges, he reconsiders our conception of transatlantic space and offers a revised conception of solidarity that is much more diverse than previously assumed. Offering a new narrative of cultural influence and performance, this work specifically demonstrates the formative role of Irish nationalist discourse - expressed in the works of Eamon de Valera, George Bernard Shaw, and James Joyce - in the transnational political and aesthetic self-fashioning of three influential Caribbean figures: Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, and Derek Walcott. It provides both an innovative historical and literary methodology for reading cross-cultural relations between two postcolonial cultures and a literary and political history that can account for the recent diversity of the field of anglophone world literature.