Attempts to unearth the ideas and debates that created the literature department as we know it. This book shows that various conflicts of our culture wars echo and recycle controversies over how literature should be taught. It also presents a history of literary pedagogy and a critical classic.

"Both E. D. Hirsch and Allan Bloom share...a nostalgia for a not very closely examined past in which things were better. Gerald Graff's Professing Literature is extremely important, partly because it tells us a good deal about the realities of this supposedly better time....Graff's book is more consequential than Bloom's because it addresses the pedagogical questions and situates them in a fascinating narrative of how literature has actually been taught in this country for the past century and a half." - Robert Scholes, College English "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"