Terry Eagleton

Terry Eagleton (born in Salford, Lancashire, on 22 February 1943) is a British literary and cultural critic, and one of the best-known Marxist intellectuals writing in English in the late twentieth century. His name is closely linked to the spread of literary theory in British universities and to a essayistic style that reaches well beyond the academy.

He grew up in a working-class Catholic family in Salford with Irish roots. As a boy he served at a local Carmelite convent, an experience he later recalled in his memoir The Gatekeeper, written in a often ironic tone. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he soon felt uneasy with the elitism of the university, and then taught at Jesus College in the same city. Later he held posts at several Oxford colleges and eventually took up a chair in cultural theory at the University of Manchester. He is now associated with Lancaster University.

Eagleton was a student of the Marxist critic Raymond Williams. He began by studying nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature before adopting Marxism as the frame for his analysis. In the 1960s he was involved with Slant, a left-wing Catholic group, and wrote theological essays. His work combines Marxism with influences from psychoanalysis and, more recently, with a renewed attention to religion and ethics.

His best-known book, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), surveys the main currents of modern criticism and argues that all literary theory is political. From there he became a steady critic of postmodernism, as The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996) and After Theory (2003) show. In the latter he argues that cultural theory has undervalued objectivity and ethics. His frequent journalism, especially in the London Review of Books, gave him a public presence unusual for an academic.

His legacy lies both in helping to popularise literary theory and in the debate he sustained about culture, politics and ethics. His criticism of postmodernism and of the New Atheism, together with his defence of the Marxist tradition, has made him a figure of both influence and controversy.