Literary Theory: An Introduction

Terry Eagleton, a British literary scholar and Marxist critic, argues in this academic study that literary theory is inseparable from political ideology, and that the field called "literature" has no stable, objective existence. First published in 1982 with a second edition in 1996, the book surveys the major schools of 20th-century literary theory while advancing the case that each conceals political commitments behind claims of neutrality or universality.

Eagleton opens by asking what literature is and dismantling every proposed definition. Defining literature as imaginative or fictional writing fails because canonical traditions have always included essays, sermons, philosophy, and letters alongside poems and novels. The Russian Formalists, critics active in Russia from before the 1917 revolution through the 1920s, proposed that literature is language representing an "organized violence committed on ordinary speech," making the familiar strange through devices of rhythm, imagery, and syntax (2). Eagleton finds this unsatisfactory, since there is no single "ordinary language" from which literature can deviate, and much admired prose is valued for its plainness. He also rejects the idea that literature is "non-pragmatic" discourse, arguing that this makes the category depend on how readers treat a text rather than on anything inherent in it. Literature, he concludes, is best understood as a functional term, like the word "weed," designating whatever writing particular groups happen to value at a particular time. Value-judgements are not merely private but rooted in what Eagleton calls ideology: the ways beliefs connect with the power-structures of society.

To demonstrate this claim, Eagleton traces the rise of English studies in England. In the 18th century, "literature" meant the whole body of valued writing, reflecting the tastes of a particular social class. During the Romantic period, the modern sense of literature as "creative" writing emerged partly as a protest against early industrial capitalism, celebrating spontaneity, organic unity, and the imagination as alternatives to a mechanized social order. By the mid-Victorian period, the decline of religion as a force for social cohesion created a need for a replacement, and English literature was constructed to fill that role. George Gordon proclaimed that "England is sick, and . . . English literature must save it . . . to save our souls and heal the State" (20). The critic Matthew Arnold argued that literary education could civilize the middle class and control the working class by instilling reverence for culture. English as an academic subject was first established in Mechanics' Institutes and working men's colleges, functioning as the poor man's Classics; it was also directed at women, considered a suitably lightweight subject for those excluded from more rigorous disciplines.

The First World War proved decisive for the subject's establishment at the ancient universities, discrediting Germanic philology and creating a spiritual hunger that poetry seemed to answer. The Cambridge critics F. R. Leavis, Q. D. Leavis, and I. A. Richards transformed English into what they claimed was the supremely civilizing discipline. Leavis and his journal Scrutiny, founded in 1932, argued that literature embodied creative energies under siege in commercial society. Eagleton credits Leavis with challenging the patrician establishment but argues that the Scrutiny project refused political analysis of the system it opposed, relying instead on education to cultivate a small elite. American New Criticism, developed by critics such as John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and Allen Tate, shared this impulse. The New Critics severed the poem from both author and reader, converting it into a self-sufficient object subjected to rigorous but politically inert dissection. Eagleton contrasts William Empson, whose concept of "ambiguity" solicited active reader participation and treated poetry as continuous with ordinary language, with the New Critics' closed readings resolved into organic unity.

Eagleton then examines phenomenology, the philosophical method developed by Edmund Husserl, which sought absolute certainty by "bracketing" commonsense beliefs about the external world and examining how objects appear to consciousness. He argues that this approach had no real place for language, treating meaning as something that pre-dates linguistic expression. Martin Heidegger broke with Husserl by grounding philosophy in the practical, temporal existence he called Dasein, insisting that knowledge emerges from practical interests and that language is the dimension in which human life moves. Eagleton credits these insights but argues that Heidegger's later philosophy degenerated into mystical worship of Being. Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics proposed that understanding occurs through a "fusion of horizons" between interpreter and text, guided by tradition, but Eagleton criticizes Gadamer for assuming a single, unbroken mainstream free of conflict. Reception theory, associated with Wolfgang Iser, shifted attention to the reader's role in constructing meaning from a text's cues. Eagleton critiques Iser's model as covertly liberal humanist, presupposing the kind of open-minded reader it claims to produce.

Structuralism, traced from Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistics through the Prague Linguistic Circle to the narratology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gérard Genette, and others, described language as a system of signs whose meanings are generated by difference rather than inherent properties. Eagleton credits structuralism with demystifying literature, demonstrating the constructedness of meaning, and challenging empiricist views of language as transparent. He also identifies its severe limitations: it was unhistorical, dissolved the human subject into a function of impersonal systems, and constituted a scientific elite as exclusionary as the literary one it replaced. Mikhail Bakhtin's critique, presented in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929), argued that language is inherently "dialogic," that signs are sites of social struggle, and that consciousness itself is constituted through language as a material means of production.

Post-structuralism pressed Saussure's insights to their logical extreme: If every sign is constituted by difference from all other signs, meaning is never fully present but is scattered along a potentially infinite chain of signifiers. Jacques Derrida developed "deconstruction" to show how binary oppositions undermine themselves, targeting the Western tradition's commitment to foundational truth, or "logocentrism." Roland Barthes's trajectory is charted through his pivotal study S/Z (1970), which treats Balzac's novella Sarrasine not as a stable structure but as a plural "galaxy of signifiers" (120). Eagleton contextualizes the shift in the political aftermath of 1968, when the student movement's failure led to a displacement of political energy into discourse and suspicion of systematic theory. In its Anglo-American form, he argues, deconstruction often became a way of evading political questions.

The chapter on psychoanalysis summarizes Sigmund Freud's account of civilization as built on the repression of the pleasure principle by the reality principle, and presents the Oedipus complex as the mechanism by which the child becomes a gendered subject and forms the superego, or conscience. Jacques Lacan reinterpreted Freud through structuralist language theory: the "imaginary" as the pre-Oedipal state of merged identities, the "symbolic order" as the structure of social roles associated with the Law of the Father, and desire as endless metonymic movement along a chain of signifiers. A reading of D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers demonstrates how psychoanalytic and social interpretations are "two sides or aspects of a single human situation" (153). Julia Kristeva's concept of the "semiotic," a pre-Oedipal flow of drives detectable in language as rhythm, disruption, and contradiction, is presented as a feminist challenge to the patriarchal symbolic order.

In the Conclusion, Eagleton proposes replacing literary theory with a broader study of discursive practices modeled on rhetoric, calling his book "less an introduction than an obituary" for the field (178). He identifies four areas where cultural and political action converge: anti-colonial struggles, the women's movement, mass media, and working-class writing. The Afterword, added in 1996, surveys developments including feminism, the new historicism, cultural materialism, and post-colonial theory. Eagleton concludes that cultural theory has successfully challenged traditional humanities but has also become a commodified intellectual fashion, sometimes displacing rather than enabling political action, while questions of human justice and freedom stubbornly refuse to disappear.