Terry Eagleton is Thomas Warton Professor of English at the University of Oxford. The Second Edition of his
classic Literary Theory : An Introduction appeared in 1996 as did Marxist Literary Theory : A Reader, co-edited
with Drew Milne. His numerous other books include Heathcliffe and the Great Hunger (1995), The Ideology of the
Aesthetic (1990), William Shakespeare (1986), Walter Benjamin (1976), Criticism and Ideology (1976), and Marxism
and Literary Criticism (1976).
Summary
In this brilliant critique, Terry Eagleton explores the origins and emergence of postmodernism, revealing its
ambivalences and contradictions. His primary concern is less with the more intricate formulations of postmodern
philosophy than with the culture or milieu of postmodernism as a whole. Above all he speaks to a particular kind
of student, or consumer, of popular "brands" of postmodern thought.
Although Professor Eagleton's view of the topic is, as he says, generally a negative one, he points to postmodernism's
strengths as well as its failings. He sets out not just to expose the illusions of postmodernism but to show the
students he has in mind that they never believed what they thought they believed in the first place. In the process
his gifts for irony and satire sharpen the reader's pleasure, and his commitment to the ethical and the vision
of a just society, inspire engagement and "a refusal to acquiesce in the appalling mess which is the contemporary
world".
