Growth through English and The Uses of English

In the British ‘zone’ of the English education world, which Australia largely inhabited throughout the twentieth century, the key book that came out of Dartmouth was John Dixon’s Growth through English. Some in the British ‘zone’ may not even be aware of the equivalent American book, Herbert Muller’s The Uses of English. 2017 was the 50th anniversary of the publication of these texts and seems a useful time to re-visit some of their key ideas. Here I want to examine these books from the perspective of what they had to say about literature in particular and, in turn, about ‘knowledge’ and ‘experience’.