Contents; Preface; TEACHING LITERATURE IN CONTEXT AND CONTEXT IN LITERATURE: Introduction - what are we doing here?; Assessing literature in context; The case for close reading; 'Context' in context; CLOSE READING AND CONTEXT - WORDSWORTH'S SONNET 'UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE'; QUESTIONS OF CONTEXT: POETRY IN CONTEXT: Shelley and Smith - 'Ozymandias'? whose 'Ozymandias'?; Coleridge's Great Escape - 'This Lime Tree Bower My Prison'; Misleading contexts - TS Eliot and 'Usk'; Form as context - when is a sonnet not a sonnet?; SHAKESPEAREAN CONTEXTS: Teaching Shakespeare - 1908 seen from 2008; Venetian contexts - Othello and The Merchant of Venice; Tongue-tied? The silent speaker in Shakespeare's sonnets; On the watch in Shakespeare - Twelfth Night, Henry V, Richard II; CONTEXTS AND THE NOVEL: Too tall? 'Handsome' in Jane Austen (Emma, Persuasion); Ways of seeing - teaching new texts (Hilary Mantel, A Change of Climate; Joe Treasure, The Male Gaze); Englishness in the contemporary novel (Julian Barnes, England, England; David Lodge, Nice Work; Zadie Smith, White Teeth); Film and image as context (Ian McEwan, Atonement; Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities); NON-FICTION PROSE IN CONTEXT: Essays and blogs (Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, Mary Beard); Travel writing - In search of England? (Rupert Brooke, Letters from America); CONFLICT AND CALAMITY AS CONTEXTS IN LITERATURE: The Literature of War ('The stage was set': concert parties and the theatre of war; 'The Lords of No Man's Land': memorialising the Great War); From the Tsunami to Saddam Hussein (Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters; Charles Lamb, Richard Aldington, Primo Levi); MOVING ON: FROM 'ENGLISH LITERATURE' TO 'ENGLISH STUDIES': Context in transition - what universities want; Poetry and translation - more questions of context; Teaching to the test - context in unseen examinations; Conclusion; RESOURCES - PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS, WEBSITES, READING; Acknowledgements; Index.