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Professor Terry Eagleton

Distinguished Professor of English Literature

Research Interests

Professor Terry Eagleton joined the Department in 2008. He has written around fifty books and is himself the subject of at least two monographs, is one of the world's leading literary critics and, according to The Independent in 2007, 'the man who succeeded F. R. Leavis as Britain's most influential academic critic.' Prior to his move to Lancaster, Terry Eagleton was John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester (2001-2008) and before that Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford (1992-2001). Professor Eagleton is a Fellow of both the British Academy and the English Association, and has held visiting appointments at such universities as Cornell, Duke, Iowa, Melbourne, Notre Dame, Trinity College Dublin, and Yale. Eagleton's post at Lancaster includes giving public lectures and offering postgraduate seminars. He also offers one-to-one tutorials for PhD students working in any of his areas of expertise - these can be arranged via the Department's Director of Graduate Studies, Dr Arthur Bradley.

Eagleton obtained his PhD at Cambridge where he was a student of the famous left-wing literary critic Raymond Williams. He then became a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, the youngest fellow since the eighteenth century, before moving to Wadham College, Oxford in 1968. At this early point in his career Eagleton was a Victorianist but he was always drawn to write on a wide range of periods - among his first books were Shakespeare and Society (1967) and Exiles and Emigrés: Studies in Modern Literature (1970). It was, though, his more theoretical work as a Marxist critic, in such books as Criticism and Ideology (1976), which really established him as a leading figure within literary studies.

In the 1980s, Eagleton engaged extensively with the various tides of continental thought that were impacting upon English Literature and he did so most famously in his book Literary Theory (1983) which remains to this day an academic best-seller. Eagleton's specifically Marxist take on literary theory is evident throughout this book and clearly informs, in the early 1990s, his continuing work on ideology, most famously The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), and his critique of the postmodern turn in cultural theory, witness The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996).

Alongside his theoretical and critical work, Eagleton was, at this time, also developing a creative dimension to his work; this led to the well-reviewed novel Saints and Scholars (1987), several widely-performed plays such as Saint Oscar (1989), the screen-play for Derek Jarman's film Wittgenstein (1993), and indeed a best-selling memoir, The Gatekeeper (2001). Well to the fore in much of this creative work is Eagleton's Irish ancestry and his keen interest in the political history of Ireland, an interest which is also evident in such critical work as Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1995) and Crazy John and the Bishop (1998).

Eagleton's Irishness connects with a Catholicism which is evident not only in very early books like The New Left Church (1966) but also such recent works as Sweet Violence (2003), Holy Terror (2005), and Trouble with Strangers (2008). These books have played a part in Eagleton's development as a public intellectual, a role he takes on most obviously in The Meaning of Life (2007). He remains, however, more than ever concerned with the meaning of literature, and even (if you will) the words on the page - hence, The English Novel (2004) and How to Read a Poem (2008).

Contact details

PLEASE NOTE: Terry Eagleton does not use email. if you wish to contact him please write to him at his departmental address: Professor Terry Eagleton, Department of English & Creative Writing, County College, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YD, UK.

News

On November 24th 2008, Professor Eagleton lectured on The Death of Criticism at the National Hellenic Research Foundation in Athens, and on December 1st he lectured on The Meaning of Life at the University of Athens (see http://www.britishcouncil.org/greece-arts-and-culture-meet-terry-eagleton.htm)

View all research activities, ePrints, news and events associated with Terry Eagleton.

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