In After Theory, Terry Eagleton takes stock of what became of the great theoretical insurgencies of the late twentieth century.

Feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism and post-structuralism transformed how culture could be read, but Eagleton argues that much academic theory then retreated into safer territory: identity, sexuality and representation considered without sufficient attention to capitalism, morality, death, evil, belief or collective political life.

Eagleton’s target is a cultural criticism fluent in transgression yet strangely embarrassed by large questions, especially those involving truth, virtue and material inequality. The argument is polemical and sometimes too eager to compress diverse intellectual movements into a single decline narrative, but its attack on theory as professional mannerism remains useful. Written after the apparent triumph of neoliberalism and before the crises that made that triumph look less secure, it asks what criticism is for once critique itself has become institutional furniture.

Allen Lane, 2003. First edition hardcover with dust jacket. Jacket shows rubbing, edge wear and light creasing; internally clean.