Terry Eagleton

For generations of English literature graduates in the Anglophone world, Terry Eagleton’s name has become synonymous with literary theory, not because he has been its leading practitioner or fiercest advocate, but because he published Literary Theory: An introduction in 1983. This widely assigned primer conceals a deep ambivalence behind its innocuous title: in his conclusion, Eagleton announces that the book has been ‘less an introduction than an obituary’, in the sense that ‘literary theory’, like literature itself, only pretends to name a bounded field of enquiry. Nonetheless, the enterprise of theory rumbled on largely untroubled for two decades (who knows how many of the undergraduates assigned the book made it to the conclusion), and so After Theory (2003) was much less demure: ‘The golden age of cultural theory is long past,’ Eagleton announces on page one. In the preface to the same work he remarks, with disarming bluntness, that theory’s contemporary orthodoxy fails to ‘address itself to questions searching enough to meet the demands of our political situation.’ 

No one should be surprised that Terry Eagleton has written yet another book about the excesses of academic postmodernism. Railing against the pretensions and deceptions and ...

One of the more robust responses to what has come to be called the New Atheism has been that of the influential literary critic Terry Eagleton. He weighed into the argument early with an aggressive and widely cited critique of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006) in the London Review of Books, in which he charged Dawkins with theological ignorance. He extended his argument in a series of lectures, published as Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God debate (2009), which condemned the atheist movement for its allegiance to an outdated form of nineteenth-century positivism and for its optimistic belief in the virtues of progressive liberal humanism. His latest book, On Evil, is a kind of supplement to the debate, in which he attempts to drive home what he considers the naïveté of such a view.

Terry Eagleton has been widely hailed as Britain’s most important contemporary literary critic. He is surely that, and a great deal more besides.

Marxist maverick, cultural theorist, budding novelist and playwright, he was for many years the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. Having traded Oxford for the University of Manchester in the early 2000s, Eagleton has roamed the globe over recent years, speaking on such lofty topics as postmodernism, deconstruction, and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

The English critic Terry Eagleton is nothing if not a dasher. Once suspected by many as the kind of postmodern theorist who undermined the category of ‘literature’, he has increasingly hiked into its territory. In The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996), he turned against the kinds of scepticism and virtuality which he saw as demeaning all literary or cultural study. The book certainly made some of his former allies quite cross, not least because it was penned with such rhetorical high spirits. His Marxist foundations, sturdily nourished in a Salford boyhood, remained, however, and were built upon. Yet they are sometimes twinned with residues of Catholic belief, as his recent attack on the atheism of Richard Dawkins has shown, full as it is of residual theology. He can certainly be an odd kettle of fish. In How to Read a Poem, Eagleton takes a broad brush. He remains at home with the traditional texts, the kinds of poems we have long deemed important.