Eagleton, Terry

   b. 1943

   Literary critic, playwright and academic

   Terry Eagleton is a British Marxist literary critic and Oxford professor, enormously influential in the 1970s and 1980s. Eagleton developed his literary career with studies of Richardson’s Clarissa, the Brontes, Shakespeare and modernism (in Exiles and Emigrés). He came to prominence with his slim overviews of left-wing theory and criticism, Criticism and Ideology (1976) and Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976). Eagleton’s best-selling Literary Theory (1983) became the standard textbook introducing and critiquing the subject, while later works such as The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) have taken his career in new directions. Less influential in the 1990s, he has still become a youngish elder statesman of the British left, a key critic of postmodernism, and one of the few world-renowned British academics.

   See also: Hall, Stuart; Marxism; Williams, Raymond

   PETER CHILDS