Terry Eagleton E-Book

James Smith

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Key Contemporary Thinkers
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 377

Beschreibung

Terry Eagleton is one of the most influential contemporary literary theorists and critics. His diverse body of work has been crucial to developments in cultural theory and literary critical practice in modern times, and for a generation of humanities students his writing has been a source of both provocation and enjoyment. This book undertakes a lucid and detailed analysis of Eagleton's oeuvre. It gives close attention to the full range of Eagleton's major publications, examining their arguments and implications, as well as how they have intervened in wider debates in cultural theory. It also investigates his less familiar works, such as his early writing on the Catholic left, as well as other as yet unpublished material, showing how these works can be understood alongside the more prominent areas of his thought. Through this, this book offers a cohesive overview of Eagleton's career to date, tracing the development of his theoretical positions, and an assessment of Eagleton's wider contributions to fields such as Marxist literary criticism and cultural theory. It will be essential reading for students of literary criticism, cultural theory, and intellectual history.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Key Contemporary Thinkers

Abbreviations

Introduction

1 Eagleton and the Catholic Left

The Context of the British Christian Left: The New Left and the Second Vatican Council

Eagleton and Slant

The New Left Church

The Body as Language

2 From Williams to Althusser: Eagleton’s Early Literary Criticism

Early influences

Towards a Marxist science of the text: Criticism and Ideology

Aftermath

Conclusion

3 The Critic as Azdak: Eagleton in the 1980s

Brecht and Company: making Brecht strange

Developing a revolutionary criticism

An introduction and an exit: Literary Theory: An Introduction

The critic and the public sphere: The Function of Criticism

Deconstructive Marxism in action: The Rape of Clarissa and William Shakespeare

4 The Ideology of the Postmodern

Aesthetics, Postmodernism, and the Body

The relevance of ideology: Ideology: An Introduction

Shattering the mirage: Illusions of Postmodernism

Return of the common culture: The Idea of Culture

Eagleton and the public sphere

5 Nationalism, Socialism, and Ireland

Rubbing Irish history against the grain

Revolution, mythology, and James Connolly: Saints and Scholars and The White, the Gold and the Gangrene

A double monument to Oscar Wilde: Saint Oscar

Conclusion

6 The Full Circle?

Reclaiming Tragedy: Sweet Violence

After Theory: then what?

The return of literature?

Conclusion

Index

Copyright © James Smith 2008

The right of James Smith to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2008 by Polity Press

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3609-2

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3610-8(pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5795-0(Multi-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5796-7(Single-user ebook)

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Key Contemporary Thinkers

   Published

Jeremy Ahearne, Michel de Certeau

Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929-1989

Michael Caesar, Umberto Eco

M. J. Cain, Fodor

Filipe Carreira da Silva, G. H. Mead

Rosemary Cowan, Cornel West

George Crowder, Isaiah Berlin

Maximilian de Gaynesford, John McDowell

Reidar Andreas Due, Deleuze

Eric Dunning, Norbert Elias

Matthew Elton, Daniel Dennett

Chris Fleming, Rene Girard

Edward Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir

Andrew Gamble, Hayek

Nigel Gibson, Fanon

Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin

Karen Green, Dummett

Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell

Christina Howells, Derrida

Fred Inglis, Clifford Geertz

Simon Jarvis, Adorno

Sarah Kay, Žižek

Valerie Kennedy, Edward Said

Chandran Kukathas and Philip Pettit, Rawls

Moya Lloyd, Judith Butler

James McGilvray, Chomsky

Lois McNay, Foucault

Dermot Moran, Edmund Husserl

Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes

Stephen Morton, Gayatri Spivak

Harold W. Noonan, Frege

James O’Shea, Wilfrid Sellars

William Outhwaite, Habermas

Kari Palonen, Quentin Skinner

John Preston, Feyerabend

Chris Rojek, Stuart Hall

Severin Schroeder, Wittgenstein

Susan Sellers, Hélène Cixous

Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read, Kuhn

David Silverman, Harvey Sacks

Dennis Smith, Zygmunt Bauman

Nicholas H. Smith, Charles Taylor

Felix Stalder, Manuel Castells

Geoffrey Stokes, Popper

Georgia Warnke, Gadamer

James Williams, Lyotard

Jonathan Wolff, Robert Nozick

Abbreviations

AG   Against the Grain (London: Verso, 1986) AT   After Theory (London: Allen Lane, 2003) BL   The Body as Language (London: Sheed and Ward, 1970) CI   Criticism and Ideology (London: New Left Books, 1976) CJ   Crazy John and the Bishop (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998) EE   Exiles and Émigrés (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970) EN   The English Novel (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) FC   The Function of Criticism (London: Verso, 1984) FD   Figures of Dissent (London: Verso, 2003) G   The Gatekeeper (London: Allen Lane, 2001) HGH   Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (London: Verso, 1995) HRP   How to Read a Poem (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007) HT   Holy Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) I   Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991) IA   The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) IC   The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) IP   The Illusions of the Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) LT   Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983) MP   Myths of Power (London: Macmillan, 1975) ML   The Meaning of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) MLC   Marxism and Literary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1976) NLC   The New Left Church (London: Sheed and Ward, 1966) RC   The Rape of Clarissa (Oxford: Blackwell 1982) SO   Saint Oscar and Other Plays (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997) SR   Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) SS   Shakespeare and Society (London: Chatto and Windus, 1967) SSch   Saints and Scholars (London: Verso, 1987) SW   Sweet Violence (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003) WB   Walter Benjamin (London: Verso, 1981) WS   William Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) 

Introduction

Terry Eagleton is arguably the most influential contemporary British literary critic and theorist. He is the author of over thirty books and hundreds of articles and essays. For a generation of readers, Eagleton’s work has provided both a guide and a provocation in the fields of literary studies, critical theory, and cultural history. His Literary Theory: An Introduction served as one of the foundation texts as ‘theory’ rose to prominence in the higher education curriculum, becoming a staple on reading lists and an academic best-seller, while his writing has influenced and challenged numerous aspects of literary and cultural studies, whether in investigating the possibilities of a Marxist ‘science of a text’, the history of the aesthetic in modern thought, or the position of tragedy in Western literature, ensuring that Eagleton is one of the most frequently cited and debated figures across the span of literary fields. Equally, Eagleton’s influence has extended well beyond the reading lists of literature departments, and he has sought to maintain what he would call a ‘public-sphere’ of readership and debate. Across a period of time in which the rise of theory has been accused of rendering literary criticism an increasingly specialized and professionalized pursuit, Eagleton’s prolific book reviews and articles have regularly appeared in periodicals and newspapers such as the London Review of Books, New Statesman, the Guardian, and even The Times, positioning Eagleton as a latter-day man of letters, a public intellectual who is as likely to be explaining the significance of an obscure aspect of literary theory as to be commenting on the discourse of terrorism in contemporary society.

At the same time, Eagleton has achieved this prominence while remaining a political radical. Over an era in which many on the intellectual Left would now more readily identify with strains of post-Marxist thought, Eagleton has been for most of his career a committed Marxist, and his writing has been characterized by critical polemic and political conviction, balanced by his flair for parody and humour. As a result, Eagleton has been a figure who has provoked both admiration and controversy, attracting recognition ranging from being voted, in 2004, one of magazine’s ‘Top 100’ British intellectuals (among whom he was the only literary theorist), to the great Canadian critic Northrop Frye once dubbing him ‘that Marxist goof from Linacre College’, and Prince Charles (as Eagleton proudly recounts) remarking to Oxford students about ‘that dreadful Terry Eagleton’.