As I implied in my previous post, the world university ranking seem to be biased towards US schools. I am sure that big US state universities have excellent graduate programs and faculty research.
You can major in English in the US and just read a bunch of 19th and 20th century novels. English at Oxbridge is more like engineering in the US, and you would study large amounts of medieval and pre-1700 literature.
This is my opinion and not provable. As you imply, my study was in mathematics, so I am not an expert in this.