Overall, the issue expresses a shared sense of the value of the discipline and of the importance of addressing the challenges it faces today. The diversities also point to shared concerns: for instance, the drive to historicise and locate, to define the point in the world from which the discipline is viewed, and the importance of the regional perspective. The ‘Memoir’ by former ALS editor Laurie Hergenhan brings these practices together in ‘a personal and tentative outline’, or what might elsewhere be called ‘a case study’ of a field and a practice or set of practices. Hergenhan’s history of ALS traces the rise of the study of Australian literature across what were key decades for the study of English. The establishment of ALS in 1963 was prompted, as he notes, ‘by the expansion of Australian universities’, and its progress was determined by the exigencies of funding as well as by the actions of pivotal and influential figures.

Several essays provide a clear indication of the way the micro-history and geo-spatial dimensions of specific cases provide a focus for a consideration of the matter of English itself. G.J.V. Prasad’s ‘Personal Journey’ sets up parameters for the discipline that will be broadly familiar to most readers, particularly in the balance or tension struck between local and international concerns, with ‘the paradigm of post-colonial studies [setting] … the frame for the study of Indian English literature in India’, which then proceeds to ‘the transformation of English departments into Cultural Studies departments’, a development of which, he insists, ‘the trajectory and motivations are distinctly local’. Daniel Bedggood’s account of the development of English in New Zealand draws attention to the success of the discipline until the 1970s, when English ‘fostered fields that later became separate departments’, including Cinema Cultural Studies. Vijay Mishra insists on the importance of smaller ‘new’ universities, noting that ‘without [their] input … the discipline of English in Australian universities would have remained pretty antiquated’.

Other essays focus more directly on the effects on the discipline of the new corporate university, the rise of managerialism, and the push to vocational education. Susan K. Martin’s comic excursus finds the signs of this shift everywhere, including, allegorically, during a family outing to ‘a well-known native animal wildlife sanctuary’, noting attempts to rebrand and market product within significant constraints determined by species and habitat requirements, with the figures of the goanna (specifically the goanna’s – unspeakable – habits of consumption) and the (much less distressing) lyrebird sketching, respectively, why we might be both afraid and hopeful. Martin’s observation that more optimism is to be found among colleagues ‘from the larger, wealthier, older institutions’ is telling. Jennifer McDonell’s fascinating ‘Report from the Field’ takes David Lodge’s novel Nice Work (1988) as a guide to the negotiations between the academy and ‘industry’, broadly but through the specific lens of distance-education specialist University of New England. She draws important connections between the current situation, Lodge’s 1980s, and the English Industrial Revolution, as recounted by Elizabeth Gaskell. McDonell’s suggestion that academics should be ‘anticipating rather than reacting to policy environments – by exercising a modicum of institutional literacy’ is well made, and surely one of the messages to be taken from this volume.

A final strength of the issue, which sits in counterpoint to its coverage of the corporate contexts of the academy, is summarised well by Vijay Mishra, who claims that ‘the question of aesthetics and the literary remain fundamental, and the lure of the complex work of art strong’. Anthony Uhlmann’s account of literary reading as ‘an active process, one that enters into and inflects the processes that correspond to our own lives’ puts this case thoughtfully and compellingly, as part of what he calls the need for academic scholars ‘to advocate properly for the discipline’, which involves, centrally, ‘[paying] attention to the way in which we define it and how we talk about it’. This important work is precisely what Dale and Dalziell’s issue of ALS sets out to do, and what it achieves.