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Terry Eagleton

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Terence Francis Eagleton (born 22 February 1943) is an English literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor (Emeritus) of English Literature at Lancaster University.

Eagleton has published over forty books, but remains best known for Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), which has sold over 750,000 copies. The work elucidated the emerging literary theory of the modern period, as well as arguing that all literary theory is necessarily political. He has also been a prominent critic of postmodernism, publishing works such as The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996) and After Theory (2003). He argues that, influenced by postmodernism, cultural theory has wrongly devalued objectivity and ethics. His thinking is influenced by Marxism and Christianity.

Formerly the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford (1992–2001) and John Edward Taylor Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester (2001–2008), Eagleton has held visiting appointments at universities around the world including Cornell, Duke, Iowa, Melbourne, Trinity College Dublin, and Yale.

Eagleton delivered Yale University's 2008 Terry Lectures and the University of Edinburgh's 2010 Gifford Lecture entitled The God Debate. He gave the 2010 Richard Price Memorial Lecture at Newington Green Unitarian Church, speaking on "The New Atheism and the War on Terror". In 2009, he published a book which accompanied his lectures on religion, entitled Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate.

In July 2024, Eagleton was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Lancaster University.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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In a parliamentary debate on Sir Robert Peel’s Bank Act of 1844 and 1845, Gladstone remarked that not even love has made so many fools of men as the pondering over the nature of money. He spoke of Britons to Britons. The Dutch, on the contrary, who, from times of yore, have had, Petty’s doubts notwithstanding, “angelical wits” for money speculation have never lost their wits in speculations about money. The main…
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
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The introduction of these philosophical phrases at the back of the French historical criticisms they dubbed “Philosophy of Action,” “True Socialism,” “German Science of Socialism,” “Philosophical Foundation of Socialism,” and so on. The French Socialist and Communist literature was thus completely emasculated.
Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
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Unstable equilibrium, rapid fermentation, and a succession of explosive reports are thus the chief notes of modern ethics. Scepticism and traditionalism, empiricism and rationalism, crude naturalisms and all-embracing idealisms, flourish side by side--all the more flourish, one suspects, because side by side. Spencer exults because natural science reveals that a rapid transit system of evolution is carrying us…
John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, and other essays in contemporary thought
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Terry Eagleton

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