Terry Eagleton: an introduction

Abstract

A student of Raymond Williams (1921-88) at Cambridge, Terry Eagleton (1943-) is one of the driving
forces in the great British tradition of materialist cultural criticism. Tributary to an oppositional line of
thought that links artistic production to the material conditions of society, the best examples of which in
the 19th century are John Ruskin and especially William Morris, this tradition had, in the troubled 1930s
of this century, its first great moment of expansion. This was a decade saturated with politics, in which the
"rumor of History" was heard with force, opening a space for the idea of engagement within the vision of
art as a unique expression of an individual's genius, predominant both in romanticism and in English
modernism.