Oxford English Limited was created by Daniel Baron-Cohen, Ken Hirschkop and Robin Gable, with support from Terry Eagleton at Wadham College.
A typical highlight was the ‘State of Criticism’ conference on 8 March 1986 (masterminded by President of OEL, Peter Higginson), at which more than 400 people assembled in the English Faculty building in St Cross to hear Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Francis Mulhern and others discuss the future of literary studies.
OEL activists in later years included Ros Ballaster, David Hawkes, Tony Pinkney, Carol Watts, Stephanie Flood, Forbes Morlock, Sally Ledger, Alastair Williams, Ben Morgan, Terry Murphy and Giles Goodland.
The editor Tony Pinkney’s contributions across these issues offer a sustained and theorised history (and counter-history) of Oxford English Studies from Matthew Arnold to the 1980s.
Oxford English Limited, despite its exiguous resources as it battled an entrenched and powerful Faculty, thus represented the new energies of the subject, and it and its William Morris-inspired journal remain a small but colourful chapter in the wider literary theory ‘revolution’ of the 1980s and 1990s.