British Council Collection

In 2002, the Milan office of the British Council—the UK’s public body for cultural relations, operating under the patronage of the British Royal Family and linked to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office—decided to close the literature section of its library to concentrate on language and language teaching. This substantial donation was catalogued only in 2012–2013, after the establishment of the Library of the School of Languages. It now includes a total of 3,306 monographs. During cataloguing, it was decided to retain the original DDC (Dewey Decimal Classification) system for shelving purposes, with the addition of the prefix 11L.FBC., indicating its location within the English Studies section (11L) and its provenance (British Council Collection). The collection consists almost entirely of monographs classified under 823 (English fiction), including works by English-speaking authors and critical monographs, published primarily between the 1970s and the 1990s. The collection also includes a number of volumes in the field of the humanities, such as history, geography, and art. All periods and genres of English literary history are represented, from Chaucer’s Middle Ages to the works of Anthony Burgess in the 1990s. While the collection devotes more space to so-called major authors, it also contains works by lesser-known writers rarely available in Italy, as well as several cornerstone texts in literary criticism.