The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue

In The Task of the Critic, Matthew Beaumont compiles fourteen official interviews conducted with Eagleton since the 1980s, interweaving these with new, original and comprehensive interviews to provide readers with a contemporary frame through which to view his thought. Opening with a preface by Eagleton, the conversations narrate not only his own intellectual development but that of the Left over almost half a century, tying his recent return to religious themes with his intellectual formation on the Catholic Left in the 1960s and to the theological interests of influential thinkers like Žižek and Badiou.

This volume will appeal not only to those with a specific interest in Eagleton himself and in the fate of the Left, but also to those interested in the trajectories of Anglo-American literary theory in a digestible, stimulating format.

Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands Fellow, University of Manchester. His other books include Ideology; The Function of Criticism; Heathcliff and the Great Hunger; Against the Grain; Walter Benjamin; and Criticism and Ideology, all from Verso.

Matthew Beaumont is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at University College London. He is the author of Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870–1900 (2005), and the co-author, with Terry Eagleton, of The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (2009). He has edited or co-edited several collections of essays: As Radical as Reality Itself: Essays on Marxism and Art for the 21st Century; The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble; Adventures in Realism; and Restless Cities. He is currently writing a book about nightwalking in cities, Midnight Streets.