Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory [Paperback]

Terry Eagleton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1978 | ISBN-10: 086091707X | ISBN-13: 978-0860917076 | Edition: Verso Ed.

Widely considered a key work of contemporary Marxist aesthetics, this book explores some of the most tenacious problems in literary theory.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The author's most remarkable volume. (Choice )

Eagleton is second to none among cultural critics writing in the English language today. (The Guardian )

Eagleton is a combative, fiercely articulate and witty Marxist literary critic. (The Nation )

Eagleton is informative, witty and wise. (Times Higher Education Supplement )

Genuinely illuminating. (Time Out ) --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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.
--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 191 pages
• Publisher: Verso Books; Verso Ed. edition (November 1978)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 086091707X
• ISBN-13: 978-0860917076
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,130,737 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Intro to Marxist Theory, October 19, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (Verso Classics, 21) (Paperback)

Eagleton gives a challenging, insightful, and readable presentation of Marxist literary theory. *Criticism and Ideology* is certainly a must-read for anyone even remotely interested in this school of thought.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Didn't blow my mind; but that's Ok, 'cause I still love Eagleton..., August 14, 2009

By 

Spunk Monkey (The pit of despair) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (New Edition) (Paperback)

I came to this book after having the circuitry of my brain rearranged by Fredric Jameson's mind altering expositions of dialectial criticism in both "Marxism and Form" and "The Political Unconscious." I was hoping that Terry Eagleton's text would be a schrewd and scalpel precise break down of a Marxist literary theoretical model of ideological critique, and a worthy companion piece to the Jameson texts. Sadly, I finished this book pretty disappointed.

Here's the deal -- this was written in '76 and Eagleton's normally sparkling prose is as dry as a hundred year-old turd. Not only that the critical model he explicates is light on the dialectic. He also mentions Freud only in passing, when later models take Freud way more into account. And his conception of how the text is an ideologial symptom of larger contradictions and the imagined solution to those problems is not compelingly described. I think in general the text suffers from being a pre-Political Unconscious text.

By his own admission, in the new introduction, this work is filled wth "tortuous formulations," and it felt torturous reading chapters 2 and 3 which is where the theory lies. Not much of it made any impression. Jameson wrote in "Marxism and Form" that dialectical criticism should make you feel the elevator just dropped out from beneith our feet feet; this book just made me dispeptic. Chapter 1 spent the great deal of time talking about the history of criticism in England, as well as why Raymond Williams is certainly not the guy, which was sort of interesting, all that William's stuff, but wasn't really what I was looking for. Then Chapter 4 talked about the ideological (re)orientations of a gaggle full of British writers from the Victorian and Modern period, which had its moments certainly, but it wasn't very exciting either. The final chapter talked about "value" since this was an important issue back in the 70s. After Jameson's valorization of Ernst Bloch's unveiling of the Utopian content of all narrative, this chapter has become moot.

[...] I typically find his work very enlightening, readable, and sharp -- just not this one, is all. It's smart but dull and not very juicy compared to more Lacanian inspired stuff. Eagleton in his intro states that this book was "of its time," in that it settled scores and dealt with issues that were important back in the mid seventies. That being said, it has more historical interest now than anything else.

Postscript --

I reread my review the next day and I felt that perhaps I was too dismissive of this text. It is what it is, which is a theoretical text predating the post-modernist and post-structuralist assaults on Marxism; and, therefore, it is not answering some of the question which come later. This text would be superb had Eagelton added a few chapters to update it, as he has done with his "Literary Theory" text. Nevertheless, some of the writing in here is superb. Chapter 4 has some terrific disections of the ideological underpinnings of Charles Dickens and D. H. Lawrence. There is also an interesting examination of the contradictions existing for these writers regarding the revolutionary "form" of the texts, and the sometimes reactionary "content" of their work. Overall Eagleton proposes that the drive towards anti-organicist works, ones which breakdown nice clean totality, are radical, though the content often comes to subvert the progressive form taken by these authors. After the post-modern and post-structuralist debates which have occured in the following decades, however, we have come to see that the break with realism and organic totality can certainly be highly reactionary as well, such as in extreme post-modernism which does not allow for any totalities particularly Marxist ones. The Marxist critique of "form and content" is more nuanced and worked through in Jameson's texts (as are notions of value, Utopia, ideology, and the connection between form and historical time periods). I rather liked some of the analysis of the writers in chapter 4, but Eagleton develops some of these same ideas about these same writers in a richer way in his later work "The Historical Novel," which is highly recommended. In all, I think I could get more out of the work than I did upon a second reading; however, for the time being this will be unlikely for, as Eagleton himself stated in his new preface, "Within a remarkably short time, then, the political and theoretical landscape from which Criticism and Iedology emerged altered almost beyond recognition."