English Now (Yearbook of English Studies 55)

The 2025 volume of the Yearbook of English Studies reflects on the current state of English as an academic discipline. It uses the history of the Yearbook itself as one prompt to this endeavour. Some of the essays that follow thus reflect on the changing fortunes and preoccupations of areas of specialism within English Studies, focusing for instance on the history of ’rhetoric’ within this field, or on the tensions at play in considerations of early modern epic across the last few decades of criticism. Selected past essays from the Yearbook are reprinted alongside these reflections to support and evidence

them. But the volume is also attuned to, and reflects on, the status of literary criticism in the (extended) moment of global, economic, and environmental crisis that characterizes the first decades of the twenty-first century. It is in this vein that the volume concludes with an open-access essay by Bob Eaglestone - ’What to do for English Now’ - addressing what we can all do today to support the discipline.