The Eagleton Reader

In The Eagleton Reader, Stephen Regan presents a lively and judicious selection of Terry Eagleton′s essays, lectures and reviews, demonstrating the breadth and incisiveness of Eagleton′s critical judgements, his playful, ironic intelligence, and his provocative intervention in the cultural debates of the past thirty years. This Reader is a valuable introduction to Eagleton′s stimulating and entertaining work on modernism and postmodernism, nationalism and colonialism, aesthetics and ideology, cultural politics and sexual politics.

Eagleton′s brilliance as a literary critic is evident in essays on William Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde and Milan Kundera, while his more ruminative theoretical and philosophical writings are amply demonstrated in essays on Raymond Williams, Walter Benjamin, Arthur Schopenhauer and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Reader includes a prefatory survey of its subject′s career, extensive introductions to each of the six sections of essays, and a comprehensive bibliography of writings by and about Terry Eagleton.

Preface.

Acknowledgements.

Part I: Literary Criticism.

Introduction.

1. The Novels of D. H. Lawrence.

2. Nature and the Fall in Hopkins: A Reading of ′God′s Grandeur′ (1973).

3. Thomas Hardy and Jude the Obscure (1974).

4. Wuthering Heights (1975).

5. Shakespeare and the Letter of the Law (1986).

6. Tony Harrison′s V (1986).

7. Estrangement and Irony in the Fiction of Milan Kundera (1987).

Part II: Cultural Politics/Sexual Politics.

Introduction.

8. The Idea of a Common Culture (1967).

9. Tennyson: Politics and Sexuality in The Princess and In Memoriam (1978).

10. The Rape of Clarissa (1982).

11. The Crisis in Contemporary Culture (1992).

12. Body Work (1993).

Part III: Marxism and Critical Theory.

Introduction.

13. Ideology and Literary Form (1976).

14. Walter Benjamin: Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (1981).

15. Human Rights and Deconstruction (1992).

16. Ideology (1994).

17. Marxist Literary Theory (1995).

18. Marxism without Marxism: Jacques Derrida and Specters of Marx (1995).

Part IV: Modernism and Postmodernism.

Introduction.

19. The End of English (1987).

20. Modernism, Myth, and Monopoly Capitalism (1989).

21. Defending the Free World (1990).

22. The Right and the Good: Postmodernism and the Liberal State (1994).

Part V: Friends and Philosophers.

Introduction.

23. Resources for a Journey of Hope: Raymond Williams (1989).

24. The Death of Desire: Arthur Schopenhauer (1990).

25. My Wittgenstein (1994).

Part VI: Ireland′s Own.

Introduction.

26. History and Myth in Yeats′s ′Easter′ 1916 (1971).

27. Nationalism: Irony and Commitment (1988).

28. Saint Oscar (1989).

29. Unionism and Utopia: The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney (1991).

30. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1995).

The Ballad of Marxist Criticism.

Bibliography.

Index.

Stephen Regan is a Lecturer in Literature at the Open University and was formerly tutor at Ruskin College, Oxford. Founding editor of The Year′s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, published by Blackwell for the English Association, he is also editor of The Politics of Pleasure: Aesthetics and Cultural Theory (1992). He also teaches Modern Irish Literature and Critical Theory for the Department of Continuing Education at Oxford University.

"Every student of English will be thankful to Regan for assembling this Reader. Useful essays frame each section and the collection as a whole serves as a splendid introduction to Eagleton′s work. His delightful wit and debunking similes make reading him fun, as well as necessary."
Gary Day, Times Higher Education Supplement "As this anthology makes clear, Eagleton′s work has been held together for nearly 20 years by a startling proposal for the reform of the academic syllabus."
"If the humanities are to be rescued from their current state of over–specialised torpor, then Eagleton′s work will be one of the main sources to which the reformers will turn." Morning Star