Green’s Dictionary of Slang

literature; also attrib.

1911		L. Pound ‘A Second Word-List From Nebraska’ in DN III:vii 549: Some common cases of ‘back-formation,’ or ‘back-shortening,’ are: [...] lit.
1924		P. Marks Plastic Age 100: There’s no sense in going over the prose lit.
1946		K. Amis letter 2 Dec. in Leader (2000) 103: I always thought that Eng Lit ought to be good.
1966		R.E. Alter Carny Kill (1993) 41: Miss Raye who had been my tenth grade Lit teacher.
1978		(con. 1940s) O. Manning Battle Lost and Won 355: Seeing that a Cambridge professor was to talk on Eng. Lit., I thought, ‘This will be quite like old times’.
1992		D. Jarman diary 24 Aug. Smiling in Slow Motion (2000) 202: They are writers who make their pronouncements through the fog of Eng. Lit.
2002		Indep. Rev. 12 Aug. 4: It was praised by John Carey, the top Oxford Eng Lit luminary.