Synopses & Reviews
Terry Eagleton, the only British literary critic to have attained celebrity status, has towered for the past twenty years in the world of literary theory and cultural studies, yet his interviews have not been collected and made available in a single accessible volume until now. In The Task of the Critic, Matthew Beaumont compiles fourteen official interviews conducted with Eagleton since the 1980s, interweaving these with new, original and comprehensive interviews to provide readers with a contemporary frame through which to view his thought. Opening with a preface by Eagleton, the conversations narrate not only his own intellectual development but that of the Left over almost half a century, tying his recent return to religious themes with his intellectual formation on the Catholic Left in the 1960s and to the theological interests of influential thinkers like Zizek and Badiou.
This volume will appeal not only to those with a specific interest in Eagleton himself and in the fate of the Left, but also to those interested in the trajectories of Anglo-American literary theory in a digestible, stimulating format.
Synopsis
Terry Eagleton occupies a unique position in the English-speaking world today. He is not only a productive literary theorist, but also a novelist and playwright. He remains a committed socialist deeply hostile to the zeitgeist. Over the last forty years his public interventions have enlivened an otherwise bland and conformist culture. His pen, as many colleagues in the academy—including Harold Bloom, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha—have learned, is merciless and unsparing. As a critic Eagleton has not shied away from confronting the high priests of native conformity as highlighted by his coruscating polemic against Martin Amis on the issue of civil liberties and religion.
This comprehensive volume of interviews covers both his life and the development of his thought and politics. Lively and insightful, they will appeal not only to those with an interest in Eagleton himself, but to all those interested in the evolution of radical politics, modernism, cultural theory, the history of ideas, sociology, semantic inquiry and the state of Marxist theory.
Synopsis
The leading literary theorist dissected in interview.
About the Author
Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands Fellow, University of Manchester. His other books include
Ideology;
The Function of Criticism;
Heathcliff and the Great Hunger;
Against the Grain;
Walter Benjamin; and
Criticism and Ideology, all from Verso.
Matthew Beaumont is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at University College London. He is the author of Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870-1900 (2005), and the co-author, with Terry Eagleton, of The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (2009). He has edited or co-edited several collections of essays: As Radical as Reality Itself: Essays on Marxism and Art for the 21st Century; The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble; Adventures in Realism; and Restless Cities. He is currently writing a book about nightwalking in cities, Midnight Streets.