Eagleton Reader Paperback - 1998

First line

It seems fitting that this book should open with an early essay on D. H. Lawrence (Chapter 1), a writer whose exploration of the problems of social class and cultural identity has had a profound and lasting appeal for Marxist literary criticism.

From the rear cover

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.