Life & Background
Eagleton was born in Salford in 1943 into an Irish Catholic working-class family, and went to Cambridge, where he was a student of Raymond Williams — the decisive intellectual relationship of his life. He taught at Oxford for many years, becoming Warton Professor of English, and later held chairs at Manchester and Lancaster. He has been a lifelong Marxist and was involved in Catholic left politics in the 1960s. He is unusually prolific and unusually readable, writing on theology, tragedy, Irish culture, and the meaning of life alongside literary theory, and has conducted long public arguments with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens on religion and with Martin Amis on Islam. His memoir The Gatekeeper is characteristically funny about all of it.
Literary Theory: An Introduction
The book surveys twentieth-century theory in chapters on phenomenology, hermeneutics and reception theory, structuralism and semiotics, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis, preceded by an account of the rise of English as a university subject and followed by a conclusion on political criticism. Its opening move is the argument that there is no such thing as literature in the sense of a stable body of writing with intrinsic qualities — the category is a value judgement made by particular institutions at particular times, and what counts as literature shifts accordingly. The conclusion presses the point: all criticism is political, and criticism that denies it is simply unconscious of its own commitments. He proposes rhetoric, in the classical sense of the study of discursive effects, as a better description of what the discipline should be doing.
The book's success — well over a million copies — has made it the way most English-speaking students first encounter theory, which gives Eagleton's framing enormous influence and has drawn the criticism that his summaries are polemical rather than neutral. His own position, Marxist criticism after Williams and Althusser, is set out in Criticism and Ideology and in the shorter Marxism and Literary Criticism. He has been consistently sceptical of the political usefulness of post-structuralism, arguing that its scepticism about meaning leaves it unable to ground opposition, and his later work turns to tragedy, ethics, and theology as unfinished business the theory boom set aside.
Key Concepts
Why Eagleton Matters
Literary Theory: An Introduction is probably the single most widely assigned book in the discipline, which makes Eagleton examinable both as a theorist and as the filter through which other theorists reach students. His argument that literature is a functional rather than an ontological category is a standard essay question, as is his claim that all criticism is political. He is also the principal continuator of Raymond Williams's cultural materialism.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Criticism and Ideology1976
- Marxism and Literary Criticism1976
- Literary Theory: An Introduction1983
- The Ideology of the Aesthetic1990
- Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic2003
- After Theory2003