[25] Lisa Jardine published a provocative piece over thirty years ago on the masculinist practice of making grand claims for criticism from a site of relative institutional security, a “his-story” that, she insisted:

“makes it clear that ‘progress’ in English Studies (and ultimately out of English Studies into Cultural Studies) is, for the male Left, explicitly a matter of a growing ‘toughness’ (machismo): a sloughing off of the ‘feminine’, marginalising origins of Lit. Crit., and an insistence on the ‘rigour’, the standing side by side in its development with the social and political sciences, of Eng. Lit. Note that whilst this account represents the gurus of Left Eng. Lit. as breaking the professional and institutional boundaries of the traditional discipline, they do so from a stable position as professional teachers within University Literature departments. That is to say, the distinction between ‘progressive’ rigour (structuralism, sociology, new historicism) and ‘mature’ Eng. Lit. (close reading, practical criticism) is in practice made without fracturing the institutional framework.”

From Jardine, ‘‘‘Girl Talk’ (for boys on the Left), or Marginalising Feminist Critical Praxis,” Oxford Literary Review 8.1 (1986): 208–17, at 210.