Cheeky

Norman Page, 16 March 1989

Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy: Vol. VI, 1920-1925 
edited by Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate.
Oxford, 379 pp., £27.50, March 1987, 0 19 812623 9
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Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy: Vol. VII, 1926-1927 
edited by Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate.
Oxford, 304 pp., £29.50, October 1988, 0 19 812624 7
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Thomas Hardy: The Offensive Truth 
by John Goode.
Blackwell, 184 pp., £17.95, September 1988, 0 631 13954 0
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The Thomas Hardy Journal. Vol. IV: October 1988 
edited by James Gibson.
Thomas Hardy Society, 80 pp., £2.50, October 1988, 0 00 268541 8
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Hardy’s Metres and Victorian Prosody 
by Dennis Taylor.
Oxford, 297 pp., £32.50, December 1988, 9780198129677
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Collected Short Stories 
by Thomas Hardy.
Macmillan, 936 pp., £16.95, October 1988, 0 333 47332 9
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... These views of Hardy might have come as less of a surprise to some of his contemporaries than Terry Eagleton seems to think, and as it turns out Goode’s book is conservative in its scope and structure. The presumed needs of the readership, in turn dictated by the imperatives of examination syllabuses, may have been responsible for the ...

Tall and Tanned and Young and Lovely

James Davidson: The naked body in Ancient Greece, 18 June 1998

Art, Desire and the Body in Ancient Greece 
by Andrew Stewart.
Cambridge, 272 pp., £45, April 1997, 0 521 45064 0
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... environment. There is plenty of theory, too, with lots of citations from Lacan, Berger, Bourdieu, Terry Eagleton and David Halperin. His exposition of these writers is exceptionally clear, but sometimes the theory, which tends to be modern and universalising, sits uncomfortably with the emphasis on cultural specificity. Immediately after an attack on ...

Post-Humanism

Alex Zwerdling, 15 October 1987

The Failure of Theory: Essays on Criticism and Contemporary Theory 
by Patrick Parrinder.
Harvester, 225 pp., £28.50, April 1987, 0 7108 1129 2
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... to keep up. For Parrinder, the typical case is that of the ‘fleet-footed pamphleteer’ Terry Eagleton, the impact of whose work ‘has been due to the adventurism of a critic swiftly assimilating, and memorably responding to, wave after wave of neo-Marxist theory. As major ...

Hero as Hero

Tobias Gregory: Milton’s Terrorist, 6 March 2008

Why Milton Matters: A New Preface to His Writings 
by Joseph Wittreich.
Palgrave, 253 pp., £37.99, March 2008, 978 1 4039 7229 3
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... to those who want to claim him for the left, an impulse summed up tongue-in-cheek (I think) by Terry Eagleton at the close of his ‘Ballad of English Literature’: There are only three names To be plucked from this dismal set Milton Blake and Shelley Will smash the ruling class yet. Milton had no interest in smashing the ruling class. He had ...

Textual Harassment

Claude Rawson, 5 April 1984

The World, the Text and the Critic 
by Edward Said.
Faber, 327 pp., £15, February 1984, 0 571 13264 2
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The Deconstructive Turn: Essays in the Rhetoric of Philosophy 
by Christopher Norris.
Methuen, 201 pp., £4.95, December 1983, 0 416 36140 4
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The New Pelican Guide to English Literature. Vol. VIII: The Present 
edited by Boris Ford.
Penguin, 619 pp., £3.50, October 1983, 0 14 022271 5
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... of the assorted band of Marxising theorisers. In both cases, the scenario is, as Terry Eagleton put it, ‘that departments of literature as we presently know them ... would cease to exist,’ and Eagleton acknowledges that the present British government ‘seems on the point of achieving this end more ...

Modernisms

Frank Kermode, 22 May 1986

Pound, Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Movement 
by C.K. Stead.
Macmillan, 393 pp., £27.50, March 1986, 0 333 37457 6
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The Myth of Modernism and 20th-century Literature 
by Bernard Bergonzi.
Harvester, 216 pp., £25, January 1986, 0 7108 1002 4
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The Innocent Eye: On Modern Literature and the Arts 
by Roger Shattuck.
Faber, 362 pp., £15, March 1986, 0 571 12071 7
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... Jameson, in the same informed, unassertive tone; the most memorable essay is actually an attack on Terry Eagleton, but the manner remains moderate even as the shafts go home. Bergonzi has obviously made a bourgeois submission to what is sometimes called ‘the tyranny of lucidity’ – a tyranny one cravenly wishes some critics would occasionally tire of ...

Lunacharsky was impressed

Joseph Frank: Mikhail Bakhtin, 19 February 1998

The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin 
by Caryl Emerson.
Princeton, 312 pp., £19.95, December 1997, 9780691069760
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... of Post-Modernism. As Caryl Emerson remarks, this idea, ordinarily associated with figures such as Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson, could hardly be explained to her Russian colleagues at various Bakhtin conferences and colloquia. They simply could not comprehend that ‘the debased Leninist and Trotskyite versions of Marxist aesthetics can still ...

Why Literary Criticism is like Virtue

Stanley Fish, 10 June 1993

... require elaboration, in almost every piece of ‘high’ theory published in the past few years. Terry Eagleton insists that ‘the literary text bears the impress of its historical mode of production as surely as any product secretes in its form and materials the fashion of its making’. Tony Bennett draws the moral (without endorsing it): ‘Rescued ...

Untheory

Alexander Nehamas, 22 May 1986

Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory after Deconstruction 
by Christopher Norris.
Methuen, 247 pp., £16, November 1985, 0 416 39939 8
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Philosophical Profiles 
by Richard Bernstein.
Polity, 313 pp., £25, January 1986, 0 7456 0226 6
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Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism 
edited by W.J.T. Mitchell.
Chicago, 146 pp., £12.75, November 1985, 0 226 53226 7
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... Such conservative views, Norris claims, support the claim of those Marxist critics who, like Terry Eagleton, accuse deconstruction of lacking serious theoretical, political, ideological or more generally critical implications. Norris answers that, despite the victory of poetry over philosophy, deconstructive criticism, properly practised, has ...

Keeping the show on the road

John Kerrigan, 6 November 1986

Tribute to Freud 
by H. D.
Carcanet, 194 pp., £5.95, August 1985, 0 85635 599 2
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In Dora’s Case: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism 
edited by Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane.
Virago, 291 pp., £11.95, October 1985, 0 86068 712 0
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The Essentials of Psychoanalysis 
by Sigmund Freud, edited by Anna Freud.
Hogarth/Institute of Psychoanalysis, 595 pp., £20, March 1986, 0 7012 0720 5
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Freud and the Humanities 
edited by Peregrine Horden.
Duckworth, 186 pp., £18, October 1985, 0 7156 1983 7
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Freud for Historians 
by Peter Gay.
Oxford, 252 pp., £16.50, January 1986, 0 19 503586 0
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The Psychoanalytic Movement 
by Ernest Gellner.
Paladin, 241 pp., £3.50, May 1985, 0 586 08436 3
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The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art 
by Leo Bersani.
Columbia, 126 pp., $17.50, April 1986, 0 231 06218 4
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... that familiar Freudian writing which, revisionary in a naive sense, reinscribes the theory. When Terry Eagleton, for instance, in his erratic and self-regarding William Shakespeare,† declares that ‘from a phallocentric viewpoint a woman appears to have nothing between her legs,’ and sets up his account of the great tragedies by stressing man’s ...

Reading Cure

John Sutherland, 10 November 1988

The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals. Vol. IV: 1824-1900 
edited by Walter Houghton, Esther Rhoads Houghton and Jean Harris Slingerland.
Toronto/Routledge, 826 pp., £95, January 1988, 0 7102 1442 1
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Circulation: Defoe, Dickens and the Economies of the Novel 
by David Trotter.
Macmillan, 148 pp., £27.50, October 1988, 0 333 40542 0
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From Copyright to Copperfield 
by Alexander Welsh.
Harvard, 200 pp., £19.95, December 1987, 0 674 32342 4
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... indicate some influence from Foucault. Elsewhere (in the manner of Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton) Trotter honours his Cambridge origins by re-tracing Leavis’s Great Tradition, in terms of the puritan ‘technique of self’. But the value of Circulation is less its schemes than its many incidental illuminations of text and authorial ...

Short Cuts

Christian Lorentzen: Snotty American Brat, 9 May 2013

... of irony, and have a thing about rain and talking about rain. I come to these thoughts by way of Terry Eagleton’s far from unfunny new book Across the Pond: An Englishman’s View of America (out in June). In his introduction Eagleton writes on ‘the usefulness of stereotypes’, which Americans dislike because, in ...

Closet Virtuoso

Seamus Perry: Magic Mann, 24 February 2022

The Magician 
by Colm Tóibín.
Viking, 438 pp., £18.99, September 2021, 978 0 241 00461 6
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... has never been a flashy stylist, and though it is slightly tough to characterise his manner, as Terry Eagleton once did, as an ‘austere, monkish prose, in which everything is exactly itself and redolent of nothing else’, he certainly has chosen to specialise in the virtues of plainness. This novel seems to me to take that disposition a step ...

Communism’s Man of Letters

J.P. Stern, 26 September 1991

Georg Lukács: Life, Thought and Politics 
by Arpad Kadarkay.
Blackwell, 538 pp., £45, June 1991, 1 55786 114 5
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... prevent him from comparing his subject to Socrates and Christ, Montaigne, Goethe and Eliot, while Terry Eagleton claims that this ‘magisterial study’ will restore Lukács to his ‘true political status’. The years of Lukács’s exile in Vienna – 1920-29 – were penurious but not intolerable. Although he and his fellow exiles had undertaken to ...

Literature and the Left

Marilyn Butler, 18 August 1983

English Literature in History: 1730-80: An Equal, Wide Survey 
edited by Raymond Williams, by John Barrell.
Hutchinson, 228 pp., £13.50, March 1983, 0 09 149820 1
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English Literature in History: 1350-1400: Medieval Readers and Writers 
edited by Raymond Williams, by Janet Coleman.
Hutchinson, 337 pp., £12, July 1981, 0 09 144100 5
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English Literature in History: 1780-1830: Pastoral and Politics 
edited by Raymond Williams, by Roger Sales.
Hutchinson, 247 pp., £13.50, March 1983, 0 09 149830 9
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The Cambridge Guide to English Literature 
by Michael Stapleton.
Cambridge/Newnes Books, 992 pp., £15, April 1983, 9780521256476
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... socialist historical scholarship is beginning to develop inside as well as outside the subject. Terry Eagleton, leader of the younger British Marxist critics, and Williams’s ex-pupil, observed a few years ago that Williams was moving closer to current theoretical Marxism. If there is some rapprochement, it could equally have arisen because more ...