John Guillory is an eminent professor of English at New York University who has written extensively on English studies as an academic discipline. Professing Criticism brings together in revised form a selection of essays he has written on this subject over the past twenty years, together with some new material. Overall, the book offers a very knowledgeable and incisive analysis of the state of literary studies today.

Guillory’s central theme is that ‘professing criticism’ is something of a contradiction in terms, since criticism has more traditionally been considered something for amateurs. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, critics tended to range widely, addressing broad social issues in their popular journalistic pieces. In the earlier part of the twentieth century, this version of the critic was considered lightweight by the literary scholars and philologists who took it upon themselves to professionalise English studies in universities, as what William James described as ‘the PhD octopus’ gathered momentum. ‘Impressionistic’ was for many years a term of abuse that textual scholars would hurl at critics who privileged their own idiosyncratic style of response above the meticulous business of archival or bibliographical research.