Terry Eagleton Criticism
Terry Eagleton, born in 1943, is a distinguished English critic, novelist, and cultural theorist, celebrated as a leading Marxist literary critic. His works, including Marxism and Literary Criticism and Literary Theory, are noted for their scholarly rigor and accessibility, exploring the intersections between literature, history, and society from a Marxist perspective while also engaging with feminist and psychoanalytic theories. Eagleton's academic journey began at Cambridge University, where he studied under Raymond Williams, later moving to Oxford University, where he became a significant figure in critical theory.
Eagleton's work is characterized by a deep examination of ideologies expressed in literature, using Marxist theory to connect literary texts with their historical, political, and social contexts. His early book The New Left Church combined literary criticism with Marxist and Catholic thought. His influential Marxism and Literary Criticism posits the author as a producer shaped by historical and ideological forces, a notion that has significantly impacted literary criticism.
In Literary Theory, he surveys major literary theories, assessing their historical and ideological bases. Eagleton's focus on Irish history and politics is evident in works like Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, where he provocatively links Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights to the Irish famine. His later works, such as The Ideology of the Aesthetic and Ideology, continue to explore how cultural and social forces shape aesthetic and ideological thought.
Critics often acknowledge Eagleton's engaging style, characterized by humor and wit. His insights into Marxist criticism have been praised for their clarity and depth, though some critique his polemical tone and ideological biases. As observed in Skull Caps, Eagleton's incisive arguments on the relationship between literary criticism and politics highlight his ability to provoke thought and debate. Despite differing opinions, Eagleton remains a pivotal figure in contemporary literary theory, influencing both students and academics with his examination of criticism's role in society.
Contents
- Principal Works
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Essays
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Phallic Woman
(summary)
In the following review of The Rape of Clarissa, Thurley concludes that the work is “a vigorous and sometimes brilliant book” marred by Eagleton's “dogmatic intensity.”
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Skull Caps
(summary)
In the following review, Hawkes offers a positive assessment of Literary Theory, highlighting Terry Eagleton's spirited introduction and its incisive argument regarding the relationship between literary criticism and politics.
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Does Literature Exist?
(summary)
In the following review, Davis offers positive evaluation of Literary Theory, though is skeptical of Eagleton's Marxist ideology and devaluation of literature in favor of other mediums of representation.
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Miscellaneous
(summary)
In the following excerpted review essay, Kellman offers tempered assessment of Literary Theory, concluding that it should be read with a “blend of enthusiasm and wariness.”
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The Function of Criticism
(summary)
In the following review, Montrose offers positive assessment of The Function of Criticism, though notes its similarity to his earlier work on Walter Benjamin. Terry Eagleton's essay seeks to ‘recall criticism to its traditional role’—engagement in cultural politics—from what he considers a position of crisis, where it is narrowly preoccupied with literary texts and estranged from social life through confinement to Academe and ‘the literary industry’ (public relations branch). Central to his argument is Jürgen Habermas's notion of ‘the public sphere’: an arena which facilitates free and equal discourse, among individuals, on cultural questions. Eagleton's starting-point is early 18th-century England, where the coffee houses and clubs and such periodicals as Steele's Tatler and Addison's Spectator comprised a ‘bourgeois public sphere’ which sustained cultural consensus. That sphere's gradual disintegration by economic and political factors is subsequently charted in a brief (and confessedly selective) history of criticism in England.
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Having Their Way with Will
(summary)
In the following review, Rissik offers negative assessment of William Shakespeare.
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Recent Studies in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama
(summary)
In the following excerpted review essay, Howard offers unfavorable assessment of William Shakespeare, which, she concludes, 'is a book that overreaches itself.'
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After the Revolution: Eagleton on Aesthetics
(summary)
In the following review of The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Sprinker discusses Eagleton's aesthetic perspective in light of Hegelian philosophy, and finds contradictions in the political aspects of Eagleton's conclusions.
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The Ideology of the Aesthetic
(summary)
In the following review, Lyas offers positive evaluation of The Ideology of the Aesthetic, though finds fault in its omission of several key philosophers and Eagleton's conclusion.
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Dialectic Without Detail
(summary)
In the following review, Griffiths offers unfavorable assessment of Ideology.
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The Ideology of the Aesthetic
(summary)
In the following review of The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Schusterman praises Eagleton's insight and rhetorical turns, though finds shortcomings in the book's omissions and contradictory assertions.
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The Ideology of the Aesthetic
(summary)
In the following review, Wright offers a positive assessment of The Ideology of the Aesthetic, highlighting Terry Eagleton's originality in uncovering the ideological motivations behind aesthetics and the philosophical questions it raises about culture and society.
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In the Defiles of Analogy
(summary)
In the following review, Lloyd offers unfavorable evaluation of The Ideology of the Aesthetic, though credits Eagleton's elucidation of the work of other major theorists.
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Eagleton on Ideology: Six Types of Ambiguity
(summary)
In the following review of Ideology, Henderson offers analysis of Eagleton's philosophical perspective and critical approach to the delineation of ideology. While citing many shortcomings and contradictions in the work, Henderson writes, “Eagleton's negotiation of this dense and difficult terrain is masterful.”
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The Ideology of the Aesthetic
(summary)
In the following review, Soper examines the development of Eagleton's theoretical analysis and socialist perspective in The Ideology of the Aesthetic, drawing attention to the tensions, ambivalences, irresolutions, in Eagleton's book.
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Ideology
(summary)
In the following review, McGowan offers positive evaluation of Ideology, though notes that some of Eagleton's arguments are undermined by equivocation.
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The Critic as Novelist
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Levenson examines the motivation among literary theorists, including Eagleton, to write fiction and offers discussion of Eagleton's novel Saints and Scholars.
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The Persistence of Idealism
(summary)
In the following review, Hogan offers a positive evaluation of Ideology, though cites shortcomings in Eagleton's 'idealist epistemology.' Ideology: An Introduction presents a conceptual and historical overview of the notion of ideology from the Enlightenment through 'post-Marxism.' It is lucid, informative, engaging, and well-argued. Although aimed at non-expert readers broadly familiar with debates in critical theory, it may be read productively by anyone from an advanced undergraduate to a specialist in political criticism. It works particularly well in a graduate Introduction to Literary Theory seminar, as I know from just having used it. Eagleton's discussions of such writers as Habermas, Gramsci, and Bourdieu help students to think about ideology more deeply and articulately, while his criticisms of current poststructural views encourage students to evaluate theories of ideology more critically and more practically.
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Ideology
(summary)
In the following review, Norris offers a positive evaluation of Ideology, noting that Eagleton's analysis has deepened and evolved over the years through exposure to various contending schools of post-Althusserian theory.
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The Eternal Rocks Beneath
(summary)
In the following review, Craig offers positive evaluation of Heathcliff and the Great Hunger. Terry Eagleton's cast of mind is erudite and ingenious, and his ingenuity is nowhere more in evidence than in the opening essay of this collection. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger superimposes an allegory of Irishness, in the person of Heathcliff himself, over the narrative of Wuthering Heights: this intractable Brontë character, Eagleton says, ‘starts out as an image of the famished Irish immigrant, becomes a landless labourer set to work in the Heights, and ends up as a symbol of the constitutional nationalism of the Irish Parliamentary Party’. Before the audacity of this pronouncement can take our breath away—so that's what Emily Brontë had in mind, and we never knew—he goes on to make out quite a good case for this eccentric reading (‘The hunger in Wuthering Heights is called Heathcliff …’).
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Spud Bashing
(summary)
In the following review, Morgan offers unfavorable assessment of Heathcliff and the Great Hunger.
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I Am Not Heathcliff
(summary)
In the following review, Donoghue provides summary and tempered analysis of Heathcliff and the Great Hunger.
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Reading Irish Culture
(summary)
In the following review, Daly offers positive assessment of Heathcliff and the Great Hunger. The essays range from the title piece, an interesting attempt to read Wuthering Heights in the context of the Irish famine of the 1840s, to an appreciation of the 18th-century Irish philosopher, Francis Hutcheson, to a discussion of the traces of Lamarckian thought in the writings of Oscar Wilde and G. B. Shaw. The vestiges of the earlier work are visible in the recurrent attempts to trace the peculiar modalities that the aesthetics of politics and the politics of the aesthetic assume in a colonial culture, though these essays are as much concerned with cultural history as with the history of ideas.
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Ideology
(summary)
In the following excerpted review, Cooper offers tempered analysis of Ideology, which he contrasts with Leonard Jackson's The Dematerialisation of Karl Marx. Eagleton and Jackson have produced two books that it is tempting to read as symptomatic of the state of Marxist literary theory in the 1990s at a time when ‘world Communism has collapsed’. Eagleton's anthology of extracts from eighteen writers takes its title from the claim that ideology is indeed the major concern of twentieth-century Marxist and Post-Marxist theory; for Jackson, on the other hand, Eagleton is classed as a bogeyman of English departments for precisely the reason that he and other ‘Althusserians’ have shifted attention away from the economic materialism of Marx's original writings, and have thereby ‘dematerialised’ not only Marx and Engels but the whole study of literature.
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Heathcliff and the Great Hunger
(summary)
In the following review, Trumpener offers positive assessment of Heathcliff and the Great Hunger and comments on the book's critical reception.
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Tickling the Starving
(summary)
In the following review, Pindar offers unfavorable assessment of The Illusions of Postmodernism.
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The Illusions of Postmodernism
(summary)
In the following review, Mooers offers positive assessment of The Illusions of Postmodernism.
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Bogged Down
(summary)
In the following review, Maddox offers unfavorable assessment of Crazy John and the Bishop. This combative book is aimed at unnamed foes. In the small world of Irish Studies, they presumably know who they are. The innocent reader can only guess.
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Phallic Woman
(summary)
- Further Reading