Skip navigation
London Review of Books London Review Bookshop

Articles marked subscriber-only content are available to registered subscribers to the print edition of the London Review of Books. For information about subscribing to the LRB, click here. If you are already a subscriber and you wish to register for online access, click here. Articles marked not in archive are not currently available in the LRB online archive.

Terry Eagleton

Terry Eagleton is John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at Manchester. His books include Literary Theory, After Theory and, most recently, The Meaning of Life.

From the London Review dated 22 May 2008

Unhoused

All literary works are anonymous, but some are more anonymous than others. It is in the nature of a piece of writing that it is able to stand free of its begetter, and can dispense with his or her physical presence. In this sense, writing is more like an adolescent than a toddler. I might pass you a note at a meeting, but a note is only a note if it can function in my absence. Writing, unlike speech, is meaning that has come adrift from its source. Some bits of writing – theatre tickets or notes to the milkman, for example – are more closely tied to their original contexts than Paradise Lost or War and Peace. [ read more . . . ]

Selected bibliography

  • The Meaning of Life (2007)
  • How to Read a Poem (2006)  Buy this book
  • Holy Terror (2005)
  • The English Novel: An Introduction (2004)
  • After Theory (2004)  Buy this book
  • Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Zizek and Others (2003)
  • Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (2002)
  • The Gatekeeper: A Memoir (2002)
  • The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996)
  • Literary Theory: An Introduction (revised edition, 1996)
  • Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (1995)
  • Ideology: An Introduction (1991)
  • The Function of Criticism (1984)
  • Walter Benjamin, or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (1981)
  • Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976)
  • The Body as Language (1970)

Search the web for Terry Eagleton: Google · Yahoo! · AltaVista · Wikipedia

In the LRB archive

subscriber-only content Determinacy Kills · 19 June 2008

Unhoused · 22 May 2008

Coruscating on Thin Ice · 24 January 2008

subscriber-only content I Contain Multitudes · 21 June 2007

subscriber-only content Have you seen my Dada boss? · 30 November 2006

  • Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality by Ewen and Ewen  Buy this book

Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching · 19 October 2006

  • The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

subscriber-only content Eat it · 8 June 2006

  • Marcel Mauss: A Biography by Marcel Fournier, translated by Jane Marie Todd  Buy this book

subscriber-only content Making a Break · 9 March 2006

  • Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions by Fredric Jameson

subscriber-only content Lend me a fiver · 23 June 2005

subscriber-only content Spiritual Rock Star · 3 February 2005

  • The Pope in Winter: The Dark Face of John Paul II’s Papacy by John Cornwell  Buy this book

subscriber-only content Running out of Soil · 2 December 2004

  • From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker by Paul Murray

subscriber-only content Living as Little as Possible · 23 September 2004

subscriber-only content Her Father’s Dotter · 22 July 2004

subscriber-only content Anti-Humanism · 5 February 2004

  • D.H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’: Post-Coloniality and the Poetry of the Present by Amit Chaudhuri

Pork Chops and Pineapples · 23 October 2003

  • Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Erich Auerbach

Reach-Me-Down Romantic · 19 June 2003

  • George Orwell by Gordon Bowker
  • Orwell: The Life by D.J. Taylor
  • Orwell: Life and Times by Scott Lucas

subscriber-only content Kettles boil, classes struggle · 20 February 2003

  • A Defence of ‘History and Class Consciousness’: Tailism and the Dialectic by Georg Lukács, translated by Esther Leslie

subscriber-only content In the Company of Confreres · 12 December 2002

Nudge-Winking · 19 September 2002

  • The ‘Criterion’: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Interwar Britain by Jason Harding

subscriber-only content Maybe he made it up · 6 June 2002

  • The Forger’s Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature by Nick Groom

subscriber-only content A Good Reason to Murder Your Landlady · 25 April 2002

  • I.A. Richards: Selected Works 1919-38 edited by John Constable

subscriber-only content Larry kept his mouth shut · 18 October 2001

  • Gallows Speeches from 18th-Century Ireland by James Kelly

11 September · 4 October 2001

A Spot of Firm Government · 23 August 2001

  • God, Gulliver and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination 1492-1945 by Claude Rawson

subscriber-only content Having one’s Kant and eating it · 19 April 2001

  • Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks 1982-90: Volume One edited by Robert Denham
  • Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks 1982-90: Volume Two edited by Robert Denham

subscriber-only content For the hell of it · 22 February 2001

  • In Praise of Meekness: Essays on Ethics and Politics by Norberto Bobbio, translated by Teresa Chataway

The Estate Agent · 2 March 2000

  • The Trouble with Principle by Stanley Fish

Mothering · 14 October 1999

In the Gaudy Supermarket · 13 May 1999

  • A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Newsreel History · 12 November 1998

  • Modern Times, Modern Places by Peter Conrad

Not currently in the LRB archive

 not available in archive Quis s’accuse, s’excuse · 1 June 2000

  • Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature by Peter Brooks

 not available in archive Hasped and Hooped and Hirpling · 11 November 1999

 not available in archive Allergic to Depths · 18 March 1999

 not available in archive Good dinners pass away, so do tyrants and toothache · 16 April 1998