Half a century ago George Steiner wrote an essay about a sense of crisis in the humanities. Its title, ‘To Civilize our Gentlemen’, conjured up Victorian educational values that seem even more antiquated now than they did when the essay was published. Eminent Victorian educationalists such as Matthew Arnold talked ‘without embarrassment’ about ‘civilizing the nation’, as Helen Small notes in her 2013 book The Value of the Humanities. To most people working in education today their attitudes, not least towards ‘civilization’, surely feel quite distant. The French notion of the ‘mission civilisatrice’, evoked in the title of my book, is likely to appear even more remote, and worse: a complacent mix of religiosity and ethnocentricity, embroiled in a shameful colonial history where the malignant rhetoric of the white man's burden served as the pretext for violent conquest.

According to Steiner's essay, the study of English literature as an academic discipline in universities rested historically on three sets of ideas. First were particular notions of national identity, and particular forms of nationalism, which developed and came to the fore in the high colonial era. Second were assumptions about the foundational value, and the ready accessibility to the educated, of classical languages and cultures, which were further assumed to underpin the superiority of ‘Western’ culture over other cultures. Finally, and relatedly, there was a deep faith in the humanizing capacities of Western high culture.

As Steiner suggested, by the mid-1960s all three of these elements had been challenged quite fundamentally, above all in the wake of the traumas and inhumanities of colonialism, the Second World War, and decolonization. Many of the challenges had come, and continued to come in the years after Steiner wrote his essay, from politically radical sources, including feminism and anti-colonialism, whose basic tenets I and many other academics in the humanities now accept without hesitation; and they had an effect on the shape of the humanities, including the way literature is taught, what literature is taught, and what is taught alongside or instead of literature. If the cultural shift described by Steiner implied a certain loss of cultural and intellectual confidence, that loss of confidence seems salutary in the context of a history of imperialism, patriarchy, eurocentricity, and other salient characteristics of ‘Western’ cultures.