Editing Terry Eagleton (section)

==Critical reactions==
[[William Deresiewicz]] wrote of ''After Theory'', Eagleton's book, as follows... :
{{blockquote|[I]s it that hard to explain what Eagleton's up to? The prolificness, the self-plagiarism, the snappy, highly consumable prose and, of course, the sales figures: Eagleton wishes for capitalism's demise, but as long as it's here, he plans to do as well as he can out of it. Someone who owns three homes shouldn't be preaching self-sacrifice, and someone whose careerism at Oxbridge was legendary shouldn't be telling interviewers of his longstanding regret at having turned down a job at the [[Open University]].<ref>{{cite news |last=Deresiewicz |first=William |url=https://www.thenation.com/article/business-theory/ |title=The Business of Theory |work=[[The Nation]] |date=29 January 2004 |access-date=29 October 2015}}</ref>}}

The novelist and critic [[David Lodge (author)|David Lodge]], writing in the May 2004 ''[[New York Review of Books]]'' on ''[[Literary Theory: An Introduction|Theory]]'' and ''After Theory'', concluded:
{{blockquote|Some of Theory's achievements are genuine and permanent additions to knowledge, or intellectual self-knowledge. Eagleton is quite right to assert that we can never go back to a state of pre-Theory innocence about the transparency of language or the ideological neutrality of interpretation ... But like all fashions it was bound to have a limited life of novelty and vitality, and we are now living through its decadence without any clear indication of what will supersede it. Theory has, in short, become boringly predictable to many people who were once enthusiastic about it, and that ''After Theory'' is most interesting when its focus is furthest from its nominal subject is perhaps evidence that Terry Eagleton is now bored by it too.<ref>{{cite news |last=Lodge |first=David |url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/may/27/goodbye-to-all-that/|title=Goodbye to All That |work=[[The New York Review of Books]] |format=fee required |date=27 May 2004 |access-date=1 July 2008}}</ref>}}

[[Jonathan Bate]] stressed the importance of Eagleton's Roman Catholic background in "Saint Terence", a 1991 review-essay in the ''[[London Review of Books]]'' before the overt religious turn in Eagleton's later works.<ref>{{cite news |last=Bate |first=Jonathan |url=https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v13/n10/jonathan-bate/saint-terence |title=Saint Terence |work=[[London Review of Books]] |access-date=28 August 2020}}</ref>