ABSTRACT
In 1962 Sylvia Plath wrote an essay entitled ‘Context’ which begins ‘The issues of our time which preoccupy me at the moment are…’. As an American in England Plath was keen to distinguish between those things which were clearly global-in 1962 it was the threat to the environment from atmospheric nuclear bomb tests-and those which were specific to her as an individual poet. The same distinction can be applied to a review of the arguments, views and practices discussed in the previous chapters. There are what might be called global forces which shape developments and debates within Subject English in all three countries. But there are also differences between the countries which are attributable to the specificities of historicism, as the three of us have been made very aware when we have attended conferences and visited schools and universities in one another’s countries.
