Introduction: Literary Rebels: A History of Creative Writers in Anglo-American Universities

The introduction gives an overview of the growth of creative writing programmes in Anglo-American universities, which has accelerated in the past three decades. It summarizes recent scholarship on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and other programmes that emerged in the mid-twentieth century in the United States. It points out the main gaps in this scholarship: (1) the history of creative writing programmes in Britain has been largely neglected; and (2) the approach has been mostly literary-sociological and many rich archives have been entirely overlooked. The opening of new archival collections in Texas also sheds new light on the history of creative writing programmes in Britain.