Terry Eagleton

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Terry Eagleton bigraphy, stories - British writer, academic and educator

Terry Eagleton : biography

22 February 1943 –

Terence Francis "Terry" Eagleton FBA (born 22 February 1943) is an English literary theorist and critic, widely regarded as the United Kingdom’s most influential living literary critic.Professor John Sitter, Chairman of the English Department at the University of Notre Dame and Editor of The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth Century Poetry, describes Eagleton as "someone widely regarded as the most influential contemporary literary critic and theorist in the English-speaking world" "Eagleton himself has also replaced Leavis as the best known and most influential academic critic in Britain." Duke Maskell, as cited by Nicholas Wroe "Terry Eagleton is arguably the most influential contemporary British literary critic and theorist." James Smith. Cited in the Introduction to Terry Eagleton: A Critical Introduction (Key Contemporary Thinkers) Polity Press, 2008

He is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University; Professor of Cultural Theory at the National University of Ireland and Distinguished Visiting Professor of English Literature at The University of Notre Dame.

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, Notre Dame, Trinity College Dublin, and Yale. He has published over forty books, including The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996) and Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983). A Marxist, in 2011 he published Why Marx Was Right.

Eagleton delivered Yale University’s 2008 Terry Lectures and the 2010 Edinburgh 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".

Education and academia

He was educated at De La Salle College, a Roman Catholic grammar school in Salford. He later attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned both his M.A. and Ph.D degrees. In 1964 he became the youngest Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge since the eighteenth century. In 1969 he moved to Oxford where he became a fellow and tutor of Wadham College (1969-1989), Linacre College (1989-1993) and St Catherine’s College becoming Thomas Warton Professor of English in 1992. In 2001 Eagleton left Oxford to occupy the John Edward Taylor chair of Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester.

Early life

Eagleton was born to Francis Paul Eagleton and his wife, Rosaleen (née Riley)."EAGLETON, Prof. Terence Francis" at He grew up in a working-class Irish Catholic family in Salford, with roots in County Galway. His mother’s side of the family had strong Irish republican sympathies. He served as an altar boy at a local Carmelite convent where he was responsible for escorting novice nuns taking their vows, a role referred to in the title of his memoir The Gatekeeper.

Critical reactions

William Deresiewicz wrote of After Theory, Eagleton’s book, as follows:

"[I]s it that hard to explain what Eagleton’s up to? The prolificness, the self-plagiarism, the snappy, highly consumable prose and, of course, the sales figures: Eagleton wishes for capitalism’s demise, but as long as it’s here, he plans to do as well as he can out of it. Someone who owns three homes shouldn’t be preaching self-sacrifice, and someone whose careerism at Oxbridge was legendary shouldn’t be telling interviewers of his longstanding regret at having turned down a job at the Open University."

Novelist and critic David Lodge, writing in the May 2004 New York Review of Books on Theory and After Theory, concluded:

Some of Theory’s achievements are genuine and permanent additions to knowledge, or intellectual self-knowledge. Eagleton is quite right to assert that we can never go back to a state of pre-Theory innocence about the transparency of language or the ideological neutrality of interpretation … But like all fashions it was bound to have a limited life of novelty and vitality, and we are now living through its decadence without any clear indication of what will supersede it. Theory has, in short, become boringly predictable to many people who were once enthusiastic about it, and that After Theory is most interesting when its focus is furthest from its nominal subject is perhaps evidence that Terry Eagleton is now bored by it too.