Paper $27.50 ISBN: 9780226305592 Published December 2007
E-book $7.00 to $27.50 About E-books ISBN: 9780226305257 Published November 2008

Professing Literature

An Institutional History, Twentieth Anniversary Edition

Gerald Graff

Gerald Graff

With a new Preface by the Author
340 pages | 5-3/4 x 9 | © 1987, 2007
Paper $27.50 ISBN: 9780226305592 Published December 2007
E-book $7.00 to $27.50 About E-books ISBN: 9780226305257 Published November 2008
Widely considered the standard history of the profession of literary studies, Professing Literature unearths the long-forgotten ideas and debates that created the literature department as we know it today. In a readable and often-amusing narrative, Gerald Graff shows that the heated conflicts of our recent culture wars echo—and often recycle—controversies over how literature should be taught that began more than a century ago.

Updated with a new preface by the author that addresses many of the provocative arguments raised by its initial publication, Professing Literature remains an essential history of literary pedagogy and a critical classic.

“Graff’s history. . . is a pathbreaking investigation showing how our institutions shape literary thought and proposing how they might be changed.”— The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
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