ABSTRACT
Introductory context Already in this book there have been plentiful allusions to the close connections between the subject English and those curricular subjects under the convenient umbrella of the humanities: citizenship (a relative newcomer to the stable, but an important one), geography, history and religious education. Some of these connections have been practically orientated, some more theoretical at base, but the intimate relationship between the subjects is readily apparent, and potentially fruitful. Indeed, over the past two or three decades there have been experiments in several secondary schools, notably during the 1980s, along the lines of incorporating English into a humanities disciplinary framework – sometimes named a Faculty of Humanities. The danger with many of these experiments, and judging from my own professional experience and observations the reason they have tended to die away during more recent years, is that the identity of English may simply be subsumed into a broadly sociological approach towards language and its texts, literary and otherwise. As we have seen, the subject identity of English is often contested, and invariably (and in my view rightly) guarded by its practitioners, so perhaps such a sociological approach has inevitable failure built in.
