A literary master’s entertaining guide to reading with deeper insight, better understanding, and greater pleasureWhat makes a work of literature good or bad? How freely can the reader interpret it? Could a nursery rhyme like Baa Baa Black Sheep be full of concealed loathing, resentment, and aggression? In this accessible, delightfully entertaining book, Terry Eagleton addresses these intriguing questions and a host of others. How to Read Literature

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.

An engaging, approachable introduction to literary modernismModernism represented an astonishing outbreak of cultural innovation, spanning artforms and nations. It was centred around feelings of growing alienation in an industrial world, and a desire to change how people live together in society. Art, architecture, literature, and music all underwent a radical revolution.Although it was confined to small coteries of artists and lasted no more than thirty ye...

**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**...

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...

Written by one of the world’s leading literary theorists, this book provides a wide-ranging, accessible and humorous introduction to the English novel from Daniel Defoe to the present day.Covers the works of major authors, including Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, the Brontës, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce.

Terry Eagleton is one of the most important-and most radical-theorists writing today. His witty and acerbic attacks on contemporary culture and society are read and enjoyed by many, and his studies of literature are regarded as classics of contemporary criticism.In this new edition of his groundbreaking treatise on literary theory, Eagleton seeks to develop a sophisticated relationship between Marxism and literary criticism.Ranging across the key works of Raymond Williams, Le...

We have all wondered about the meaning of life. But is there an answer? And do we even really know what we're asking? Terry Eagleton takes a stimulating and quirky look at this most compelling of questions: at the answers explored in philosophy and literature; at the crisis of meaning in modern times; and suggests his own solution to how we might rediscover meaning in our lives.

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...

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 clear-sighted and entertaining defence of literary realism, and an account of its key practitionersRealist fiction is one of the most enduring artforms history has ever witnessed. By describing the intricate inner life of its characters, or widening its focus to set their experience in context, it can evoke the reader’s sympathies as few other forms can. Yet it is also by and large a product of the middle classes: boldly individualist and fascinated by money, pro...

'We are free when, like artists, we produce without the goad of physical necessity' Karl MarxFor Marx, freedom entailed release from commercial labour. In this highly engaging account, Eagleton outlines the relationship between production, labour and ownership which lie at the core of Marx's thinking. Marx's utopia was a place in which labour is increasingly automated, emancipating the wealth of sensuous individual development so that 'savouring a peach [is an aspe...