-How to read literature 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 Eagletonis 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 coedited with Drew Milne Marxist Literary Theory A Reader (1996).

Contents: Openings --
Character --
Narrative --
Interpretation --
Value.