The Event of Literature

Terry Eagleton

 

5.5 x 8.25 inches, 264pp. 2016

ISBN : 9788170463559

Rs  495.00 (PB)
$0.00 (PB)
£0.00 (PB)

Buy (PB)

In this characteristically concise, witty, and lucid book, Terry Eagleton turns his attention to the questions we should ask about literature, but rarely do. What is literature? Can we even speak of ‘literature’ at all? What do different literary theories tell us about what texts mean and do? In a highly unusual combination of critical theory and analytic philosophy, the author sees all literary work, from novels to poems, as a strategy to contain a reality that seeks to thwart that containment, and in doing so throws up new problems that the work tries to resolve. The ‘event’ of literature, he argues, consists in this continual transformative encounter, unique and endlessly repeatable. Freewheeling through centuries of critical ideas, he sheds light on the place of literature in our culture, and in doing so reaffirms the value and validity of literary thought today.

Terry Eagleton  is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature, University of Lancaster, England, and Professor of Cultural Theory at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His other books include Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976), Criticism and Ideology (1976), Walter Benjamin (1981), Against the Grain (1986), William Shakespeare (1986), The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), Ideology (1991), Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1995), Literary Theory (2nd ed. 1996), and, co-edited with Drew Milne, Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (1996). 

 

Literary Theory
Literary Criticism
200 Years of Marx