IN THE LAST FEW YEARS, professors of literature have embarked, to use Winnie the Pooh's word, on a long explore. Hermeneutics, decon struction, feminist criticism, reader-response theory, the politics of canon creation, the new historicism, theories of narrative ?all vie for the atten tion of literary scholars. From the outside (I was trained as a historian and work in a department of history), nothing looks so intriguing, so perplex ing, and so potentially frustrating, as the hothouse atmosphere within English Departments, for the swirl of critical methods has created both a sense of liberating promise and nervous defensiveness within them. Each of the three books under review attempts to answer the question: how did literary studies get to where they are today? Kermit Vanderbilt's American Literature and the Academy recounts the efforts to make American literature a university subject from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s. Richard Ohmann's The Politics of Letters is much broader, looking at popular literature, mass market magazines, advertising, and the pub lishing industry, as well as discussing modern academic literary study. Gerald Graff's Professing Literature: An Institutional History is a study of the profession of English in the American university from the late nineteenth century to today. Vanderbilt's book, the thickest in pages, is a rather pedestrian account of the rise of the subdiscipline of American literature within the univer sity. The way he fails is worth some comment. His work exemplifies a point of view about professional humanistic research that was au courant sometime around 1955. His presumptions open a window on the past. The story Vanderbilt tells is one of triumphant professionalism. From the sour beginnings in the nineteenth century, he traces the steady incur sion of American literature into the university and the growing sophistica tion of American literary scholars. His endpoint, one that reflects a fully mature profession, is The Literary History of the United States (1948), edited by Robert Spiller, among others.