Terry Eagleton

Terence Eagleton was born on 22 February 1943 in Salford, England. The Independent described his as ‘the man who succeeded F. R. Leavis as Britain’s most influential academic critic’. In 1964, he was the youngest fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge since the eighteenth century. In 1968, he moved to Wadham College, Oxford as Fellow and Tutor, and was appointed Thomas Warton Professor of English in 1992. Made John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at Manchester in 2001, he became Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster in 2008, eventually achieving emeritus status. 

Eagleton is Fellow of the British Academy and has held visiting appointments at Cornell, Duke, Melbourne, Notre Dame, Trinity College Dublin, and Yale. His book, Literary Theory (1983), remains a best-seller. Other notable works include Shakespeare and Society (1967), Exiles and Emigrés (1970), Criticism and Ideology (1976), The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996), and Why Marx Was Right (2011). He also wrote a novel, Saints and Scholars (1987), a play, Saint Oscar (1989), and a memoir, The Gatekeeper (2001).