Showing results for "terry eagleton"

An engaging, insightful meditation on death, from one of our leading mindsDeath is ever-present in literature. From Shakespearean tragedies to elegiac poetry, the spectre of human mortality has always haunted writers.In this wide-ranging and personal account, Terry Eagleton examines the ways in which western culture has reflected on death. Eagleton looks at the works of novelists, poets, and playwrights—including Andrew Marvell and Dylan Thomas, Samuel Beck...

**One of the foremost Marxist critics of his generation forcefully argues against Marx's irrelevancy"Reading a book by Terry Eagleton is like watching fireworks."—Dennis O'Brien, Christian Century"[Eagleton is] a witty, insightful thinker with a penchant for glib asides and wry dashes of humor. It’s probably the only book that makes references to Tiger Woods and Mel Gibson along with Charles Fourier and Michel Foucault."—Michael Patrick Brady, PopMatters**...

Lucid, entertaining and full of insight, How To Read A Poem is designed to banish the intimidation that too often attends the subject of poetry, and in doing so to bring it into the personal possession of the students and the general reader.Offers a detailed examination of poetic form and its relation to content.Takes a wide range of poems from the Renaissance to the present day and submits them to brilliantly illuminating closes analysis.

In this pithy, warmhearted, and very funny book, Eagleton melds a good old-fashioned roast with genuine admiration for his neighbors "across the pond."Americans have long been fascinated with the oddness of the British, but the English, says literary critic Terry Eagleton, find their transatlantic neighbors just as strange. Only an alien race would admiringly refer to a colleague as “aggressive,” use superlatives to describe everything from one’s pet dog to one’s rock collection, o...

"A fine, fast and very funny meditation" from the notable British intellectual ( Washington Post).If you're looking for a field guide to leprechauns, T he Truth About the Irish is not the book for you. But if you can handle a frank and funny look into the minds and hearts of Irish people, you've been touched by that fabled Irish luck.Covering all things Irish from Blarney to Yeats, renowned literary and cultural critic Terry Eagleton separ...

Ideology has never before been so much in evidence as a fact, and so little understood as a concept, as it is today. In this now classic work, originally written for both students and for those already familiar with the debates around the concept, the celebrated literary theorist Terry Eagleton unravels its many definitions, exploring its tortuous history from the Enlightenment to the present.A limpid account of the thought of key Marxist thinkers, as well as that of philosophers f...

How to live in a supposedly faithless world threatened by religious fundamentalism? Terry Eagleton, formidable thinker and renowned cultural critic, investigates in this thought-provoking book the contradictions, difficulties, and significance of the modern search for a replacement for God. Engaging with a phenomenally wide range of ideas, issues, and thinkers from the Enlightenment to today, Eagleton discusses the state of religion before and after 9/11, the ironies surrounding Western ...

The golden age of cultural theory (the product of a decade and a half, from 1965 to 1980) is long past. We are living now in its aftermath, in an age which, having grown rich in the insights of thinkers like Althusser, Barthes and Derrida, has also moved beyond them. What kind of new, fresh thinking does this new era demand? Eagleton concludes that cultural theory must start thinking ambitiously again - not so that it can hand the West its legitimation, but so that it can seek to make sens...

In a virtuoso display of erudition, thoughtfulness and humour, Terry Eagleton teases apart the concept of hope as it has been (often mistakenly) conceptualised over six millennia, from ancient Greece to today. He distinguishes hope from simple optimism, cheeriness, desire, idealism or adherence to the doctrine of Progress, bringing into focus a standpoint that requires reflection and commitment, arises from clear-sighted rationality, can be cultivated by practice and self-discipline, and w...

One of the foremost Marxist critics of his generation forcefully argues against Marx's irrelevancyIn this combative, controversial book, Terry Eagleton takes issue with the prejudice that Marxism is dead and done with. Taking ten of the most common objections to Marxism—that it leads to political tyranny, that it reduces everything to the economic, that it is a form of historical determinism, and so on—he demonstrates in each case what a woeful travesty of Marx's o...

A brilliant introduction to the philosophical concept of materialism and its relevance to contemporary science and cultureIn this eye-opening, intellectually stimulating appreciation of a fascinating school of philosophy, Terry Eagleton makes a powerful argument that materialism is at the center of today’s important scientific and cultural as well as philosophical debates. The author reveals entirely fresh ways of considering the values and beliefs of three very di...

One of our most brilliant minds offers a sweeping intellectual history that argues for the reclamation of culture’s valueCulture is a defining aspect of what it means to be human. Defining culture and pinpointing its role in our lives is not, however, so straightforward. Terry Eagleton, one of our foremost literary and cultural critics, is uniquely poised to take on the challenge. In this keenly analytical and acerbically funny book, he explores how culture and our...