Literary Strategies

Abstract

Terry Eagleton's new book examines the ways in which literary theorists have asked how the concept of ‘literature’ may be defined, and evaluates the persuasiveness and usefulness of these attempts. With characteristic lucidity, Eagleton demonstrates the value that various literary theories have in pointing our understanding of particular texts and authors towards a wider conceptual grasp of imaginative literature. At the same time, as in some of his earlier work, he is quick to address what he sees as the universalising limitations of literary theory. He deeply admires the intelligence and rigour of the great theorists, but cannot submit himself to any single one of them. Eagleton's Marxist interpretation of literature leads him to the conclusion that no form of literary theory is sufficiently alert to the historical specificity of its origins. Consequently, no theory can offer a complete conceptual framework for analysing literature. In this respect, Eagleton's judgement is curiously close to Christopher Ricks's criticisms of literary theory, though Eagleton finds its proceedings infinitely more stimulating and fruitful than ‘appreciative’ literary criticism, of which he is often reductively scornful. (He has admitted that his representations of non-theoretical literary criticism sometimes amount to travesties.)