In this paradigm shifting essay, Michael Gardiner examines the discipline of English Literature in the light of changing thinking on national and sovereignty. He argues that English Literature developed along with the British state, and that it has always been defined in terms of the boundaries of the British sovereignty described by Union and Empire, which block collective experience. His claim is that English Literature is losing its form since its methodology and canonicity have depended so heavily on a constitutional form now being discredited. He calls upon those working in English Literature to see the ongoing underpinning of the discipline by the eighteenth-century unification which was codified by the Burkean constitutional settlement, and to understand this settlement not only in terms of content or canonical line-up, but more fundamentally in terms of English Literature's methodologies. In its place, he suggests a more open-ended, inclusive and internationalist literature, free of the founding imperial assumptions which created a 'shadow-constitution'. This is a key work for a discipline struggling to contain postcolonial and world literatures within its own ideological framework. It is an essential book for students and scholars of English Literature and will be of great interest to political theorists, historians and general readers concerned with questions of nation and culture. Book jacket.