Stefan Collini

Biographic Data

ID302676
NAMEStefan Collini
GIVEN NAMESStefan
FAMILY NAMECollini
SIGNATURECOLLINI S
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Cambridge
ORCID0000-0002-3316-471X
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS44
TOTAL CITATIONS109
AUTHOR COUNT41
EDITOR COUNT3
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1975
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX6

  • Carol Atherton, Reading Lessons

    Open AccessStefan ColliniARTICLESociety2025

  • Richard Davenport-Hines, History in the House

    Open AccessStefan ColliniARTICLESociety2024

  • When George met Bill

    Open AccessStefan ColliniARTICLEModern Intellectual History2020

    George Orwell and William Empson worked closely together at the BBC during the Second World War and they remained friends thereafter. In The Structure of Complex Words (1951) Empson paid surprisingly serious attention to the view of language expounded in Nineteen Eighty-Four , seeing in Orwell's presentation of the meaningless slogans of totalitarianism, such as “War Is Peace,” a challenge to his own more rationalistic analysis of how language wo…

  • The History of ‘the Reading Public’

    Stefan ColliniBOOKThe Nostalgic Imagination2018

    This chapter argues that accounts of ‘the reading public’ are always fundamentally historical, usually involving stories of ‘growth’ or ‘decline’. It examines Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public , which builds a relentlessly pessimistic critique of the debased standards of the present out of a highly selective account of literature and its publics since the Elizabethan period. It goes on to exhibit the complicated analysis of the role o…

  • The Nostalgic Imagination

    Stefan ColliniBOOKThe Nostalgic Imagination2018

    This unusual book explores the historical assumptions at work in the style of literary criticism that came to dominate English studies in the twentieth century. Stefan Collini shows how the work of critics renowned for their close attention to ‘the words on the page’ was in practice bound up with claims about the nature and direction of historical change, the interpretation of the national past, and the scholarship of earlier historians. Among th…

  • Clarisse Berthezène Les conservateurs britanniques dans la bataille des idées, 1929-1954. Ashridge College, premier think-tank conservateur Paris, Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politi…

    Stefan ColliniARTICLEAnnales Histoire Sciences Sociales2016

    Clarisse Berthezène Les conservateurs britanniques dans la bataille des idées, 1929-1954. Ashridge College, premier think-tank conservateur Paris, Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 2011, 334 p. - Volume 71 Issue 2

  • Defending universities

    Open AccessStefan ColliniARTICLEPower and Education2015Cited by: 2

    In response to the subjection of universities in Britain and elsewhere to ‘free market’ ideology and the resulting narrow concern with claimed economic effects and benefits, this essay explores some of the processes of persuasion and justification as they are employed in debate and in resistance to this damaging orthodoxy. First, the short-term assumptions behind crude measurements of impact and economic benefit must be contested; the growth of h…

  • Seeing a Specialist

    Stefan ColliniARTICLEPast & Present2015

    The humanities form a relatively small part of the modern research university, but they bulk very large in all discussions about the ‘idea’ or ‘purpose’ or ‘future’ of universities. This may not simply be because those who dilate on these matters are drawn disproportionately from humanities disciplines. It may also be because the discourse about the humanities has become a locus (and in some respects a placeholder) for wider anxieties about chang…

  • The Two Cultures Controversy

    Stefan ColliniARTICLETwentieth Century British History2009

    Journal Article The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature, and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain. By Guy Ortolano. Get access The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature, and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain. By Guy Ortolano. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009. 295 pp. ISBN 978-0521892049, £55. Stefan Collini Stefan Collini University of Cambridge Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Schol…

  • Author's Response

    Open AccessStefan ColliniARTICLEPolitical Studies Review2007Cited by: 1References: 4

  • Author's Response

    Stefan ColliniARTICLEJournal of the History of Ideas2007

    In addressing the main points made by the five discussants, this response acknowledges possible failures of execution in the writing of Absent Minds. But it reaffirms the value of examining British traditions of debate about "the question of intellectuals" in analytical and comparative terms; it emphasizes that the figures and episodes discussed in some detail were not selected to be representative of political affiliations or of gender of any ot…

  • The Literary Critic and the Village Labourer

    Open AccessStefan ColliniARTICLETransactions of the Royal…2004

    Debates about the concept of ‘culture’ in Britain are usually related to the perceived rise of ‘mass society’ in the early decades of the twentieth century. This essay re-situates such debates in relation to the development, from the 1870s onwards, of an ethically driven interpretation of changes in English society in the late eighteenth century. Through an examination of the later work of the Hammonds and of its reception in the late 1940s and e…

  • On Variousness; and On Persuasion

    Stefan ColliniARTICLENew left review2004

    The resources culture may appropriately furnish for a critique of society, not always unpolitical, defended against Francis Mulhern’s case in Metaculture and its sequels. Does criticism persuade by attraction of example, or by force of proposition

  • Defending Cultural Criticism

    Stefan ColliniARTICLENew left review2002Cited by: 1

    Is cultural criticism condemned to the gestures of an anti-political disdain, whether Right or Left in origin? Replying to Francis Mulhern in NLR 16, Stefan Collini argues to the contrary that it signifies an indispensable moment of committed reflection

  • Postscript. Disciplines, canons and publics

    Open AccessStefan ColliniCHAPTERHistory of Political Thought in…2001

    It is always desirable that a part of the education of those persons who are either born into, or qualified by their abilities to enter, the superior political grades of society, should be instruction in history, and that a part of the study of history should be the history of political theory.(T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (London, 1948), p. 88)

  • Culture Talk

    Stefan ColliniARTICLENew left review2001

    Between the elite traditions of Kulturkritik and the populist enthusiasms of Cultural Studies, nominal antagonists, Francis Mulhern’s Culture/Metaculture discerns a covert bond—a common hostility to politics proper, as the antonym of culture. Stefan Collini queries his way of resolving the tension between these two

  • Economy, Polity, and Society

    Open AccessB W Young, Stefan Collini et al.BOOKEconomy, Polity, and Society2000

    Economy, Polity, and Society and its companion volume History, Religion, and Culture bring together major new essays on British intellectual history by many of the leading scholars of the period, continuing a mode of enquiry for which Donald Winch and John Burrow have been widely celebrated. This volume addresses aspects of the eighteenth-century attempt, particularly in the work of Adam Smith, to come to grips with the nature of 'commercial soci…

  • Books in review

    Open AccessJenna Weissman Joselit, Ron Christenson et al.ARTICLESociety1995

  • My public is bigger than yours

    Open AccessStefan ColliniARTICLEJournal of the History of the…1994

  • À la recherche de l'Angleterre perdue

    Stefan ColliniARTICLELe Débat1994Cited by: 1

  • Culture and Anarchy and other writings

    Open AccessMatthew Arnold, Stefan ColliniBOOKArnold1993

    Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869) is one of the most celebrated works of social criticism ever written. It has become an inescapable reference-point for all subsequent discussion of the relations between politics and culture, and it has exercised a profound influence both on conceptions of the distinctive nature of British society, and on ideas about education and the teaching of literature more generally. This edition establishes the a…

  • The Two Cultures

    Open AccessC P Snow, Stefan ColliniBOOKTwo Cultures1993

    The notion that our society, its education system and its intellectual life, is characterised by a split between two cultures – the arts or humanities on one hand, and the sciences on the other – has a long history. But it was C. P. Snow's Rede lecture of 1959 that brought it to prominence and began a public debate that is still raging in the media today. This 50th anniversary printing of The Two Cultures and its successor piece, A Second Look (i…

  • Interpretation and Overinterpretation

    Open AccessUmberto Eco, Jonathan Culler et al.BOOKInterpretation and Overinterpretati…1992

    Umberto Eco, international bestselling novelist and leading literary theorist, here brings together these two roles in a provocative discussion of the vexed question of literary interpretation. The limits of interpretation - what a text can actually be said to mean - are of double interest to a semiotician whose own novels' intriguing complexity has provoked his readers into intense speculation as to their meaning. Eco's illuminating and frequent…

  • Public Moralists

    Reba N Soffer, Stefan ColliniREVIEWThe American Historical Review1992

    bership of the Athenaeum Club in 1873 under the provisions of the club's Rule II.This rather obscure reference, revealed to the reader early on in Stephen Collini's Public Moralists, serves in many ways as a shorthand description of the argument which the author proceeds to build throughout the remainder of the work.The Athenaeum Club was generally considered to represent the peak of London's clubland, especially for the subjects of Collini's int…

  • Meaning and Interpretation

    Madhu Prasad, Umberto Eco et al.ARTICLESocial Scientist1992