While engaging with the current political-educational climate of England, this book offers a timely contribution to debates around questions of knowledge in relation to education and school-level English by drawing together theories of individual and disciplinary knowledge.

The book provides a philosophical conception of knowledge – as fundamentally embodied at the level of the individual, and a matter of cultural form at the level of shared or "common" knowledge – and an analysis of the implications of this for schooled English. The research draws from various related fields including literary criticism, philosophy (of knowledge and of symbolic form), and phenomenology. The book rethinks general notions of knowledge and lays out the problems that exist within knowledge and language systems in education, especially secondary and university levels.

This highly relevant and informative book offers an insightful resource for academics, researchers, and post-graduate students in the fields of education studies, educational policy and politics, philosophy of education, and literature studies.