Questions the manner in which, since the 18th century, a supposed English cultural centre has controlled the way we read. The author interrogates the Anglocentricity of the subject English literature, demonstrating how it has governed our reading of unEnglish and provincial texts. Dealing with English, American, Irish, Australian and other writings, Crawford concentrates on Scottish literature, which furnishes the most extended and acute model of a culture concerned to maintain and develop its own identity while engaging with England's linguistic and political dominance. Starting with the 18th-century Scottish invention of English literature, Crawford traces in Boswell, Burns and others, the evolution of a distinctively British literature which culminated in Scott who, with Carlyle, encouraged 19th-century American writing and left rich legacies both to anthropology and the literary Modernism of Eliot, Pound, Joyce and MacDiarmid. This essentially provincial phenomenon of Modernism underwrites even Larkin, as well as such sophisticated post-British barbarian poets as Heaney, Harrison, Dunn, Murray and Walcott. This book contributes to the the current debates regarding English-speaking literary culture and the participation in it of non-English speakers, arguing for devolutionary readings, alert to nuances of cultural difference.