ABSTRACT
Literature' in its academic guise as 'English' has been, from its inception, a particular reading practice dense with the history of cultural power in Britain, and redolent with the history of imperialism throughout the world. State sponsorship of education was the preferred mechanism by which culture could be preserved and extended to resist the driving imperatives of an increasingly mechanical and materialist civilisation. The poetics of transformation examines the ways in which writers and readers contribute constitutively to meaning, how colonised societies appropriate imperial discourses, how they interpolate their voices and concerns into dominant systems of textual production and distribution. The key to the link between classical imperialism and contemporary globalisation in the twentieth century has been the role of the United States, which almost effortlessly took over the command of empire from Britain at the turn of the century.
