The Eagleton Reader (Blackwell Readers Series)

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.

Morning Star

If the humanities are to be rescued from their current state of over-specialised torpor, then Eagleton's work will be one of the main sources to which the reformers will turn.

Stephen Regan is a Lecturer in Literature at the Open University and was formerly tutor at Ruskin College, Oxford. Founding editor of The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, published by Blackwell for the English Association, he is also editor of The Politics of Pleasure: Aesthetics and Cultural Theory (1992). He also teaches Modern Irish Literature and Critical Theory for the Department of Continuing Education at Oxford University.