Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read
TERRY EAGLETON
(YALE university press, 336 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064

Three pairs of spectacles, two receding hairlines and a walrus moustache. The five chaps depicted on the front of Terry Eagleton’s Critical Revolutionaries don’t look like trouble. Holding up a placard adorned with the book’s subtitle, William Empson looks like a ground-support lackey guiding a Spitfire in to land after a sortie in the Battle of Britain. Looks can deceive, of course. With his blousons and blow-dries, Jacques Derrida, a more frequent habitué of Eagleton’s work, always had the look of an ageing chansonnier.

As with looks, so with books, says Eagleton. By now, several generations of students have been taught to regard the criticism of T.S. Eliot or F.R. Leavis as the last word in hidebound fuddy-duddyism. Thanks to the influx of various types of literary theory – linguistic, Marxist, feminist, postcolonial etc. – the average Eng. Lit. graduate of the past four decades has left university without realising how much of what they’ve been taught owes to a bunch of earlier, defiantly non-sexy Anglo-Saxon critics. They might know about deconstruction and différance, but they likely don’t know that I.A. Richards was arguing for the dispersed yet ineluctably contextualised nature of meaning years before Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena appeared.