Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory is both a map of twentieth-century criticism and an argument against treating literature as a sealed realm of aesthetic value.

Beginning with the deliberately troublesome question “What is literature?”, Eagleton moves through phenomenology, hermeneutics, reception theory, structuralism, semiotics, post-structuralism and psychoanalysis, explaining not only what these schools propose but what historical and institutional needs made them possible.

Written from a Marxist perspective, the book’s real subject is the politics concealed inside supposedly neutral acts of interpretation. Eagleton argues that literary criticism has always helped decide which forms of language, knowledge and social experience count as legitimate. His account is lucid, combative and often funny, though plainly situated within the theoretical battles of the early 1980s; later feminist, postcolonial and queer criticism receive little or no sustained treatment. It remains valuable precisely because it refuses the fantasy that criticism simply discovers meaning. For readers beginning literary theory, returning to its major disputes, or interested in how the academic study of literature became an ideological institution.

Basil Blackwell, 1983 early reprint paperback. Cover rubbing, creasing and edge wear; internally clean with mild page toning.