Cirrus@Austlit

'John Guillory’s Professing Criticism (2022) is, without doubt, a tour de force of critical scholarship and intellectual acumen. He delves deep into the rise of vernacular languages and the history of English literature, charting the development of literary criticism as a profession and the emergence of English literature as a discipline. Guillory’s account makes it clear that one of these things need not inevitably lead to the other, a point reinforced by his explanation of their separate origins and the case studies he puts forward of two ‘failed disciplines’ (belles lettres and philology). The meticulous and exhaustive genealogy he provides for the formation of English literature makes the narrowness of his definition of what constitutes such a literature all the more startling. From an Antipodean perspective, it is astonishingly Americentric, especially for a theorist so clearly attuned to the expansion of English literature beyond national borders.'  (Introduction)