European English Studies: Contributions towards the History of a Discipline. Ed. Balz Engler and Renate Haas (Published for The European Society for the Study of English by The English Association, 2000)

The 390 densely printed pages of the first comprehensive attempt to chart the history of European English Studies unveil a fascinating, if far from complete picture of an uneasy birth and of a no less difficult growth of a discipline which is very likely to become one of the most important fields of academic studies in the 21st century. If for no other reason than the gradual emergence of the English tongue from a provincial insular medium into an (almost) world-wide and in the past few decades also Europe-wide lingua franca, English has become the focal point of what is by now a broad spectrum of ramified scholarly efforts which could only partly be covered by this publication. Being the first of its kind, this survey has, moreover, many shortcomings that could hardly have been avoided, such as the rather varied methodological approach of the individual authors which, however, occasionally makes the reader feel as if the disparity between the individual contributions was somewhat greater than would be warranted by the natural difference in individual styles and perspectives and by the actually rather disparate developments of the respective national English Studies.

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