Terry Eagleton Literary Quotations

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.

I do not know whether to be delighted or outraged by the fact that Literary Theory: An Introduction was the subject of a study by a well known U.S. business school, which was intrigued to discover how an academic text could become a best-seller.

You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.

It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.

What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism .

Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.