Terence Francis Eagleton FBA[4] (born 22 February 1943) is an English philosopher, literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual.

[11] He gave the 2010 Richard Price Memorial Lecture at Newington Green Unitarian Church, speaking on "The New Atheism and the War on Terror".

He served as an altar boy at a local Carmelite convent where he was responsible for escorting novice nuns taking their vows, a role referred to in the title of his memoir The Gatekeeper (2002).

[14] Eagleton was educated at De La Salle College, a Roman Catholic grammar school in Pendleton, Salford.

He then published an attack on his mentor Williams's relation to the Marxist tradition in the pages of the New Left Review, in the mode of the French critic Louis Althusser.

In chapter 4 he gives a thorough overview of one theme in the English context – "organicist concepts of society" or "community" – as worked by petty-bourgeois Victorian writers, from George Eliot to D. H. Lawrence, and how this determines textual form in each instance.

In Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983, revised 1996), Eagleton surveys the history of theoretical approaches to literature, from its beginnings with Matthew Arnold, through formalism, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, to post-structuralism.

[16] Eagleton's approach to literary criticism is one firmly rooted in the Marxist tradition, though he has also incorporated techniques and ideas from more recent modes of thought as structuralism, Lacanian analysis and deconstruction.

He considers that among the great achievements of Theory were the expansion of objects of study (to include gender, sexuality, popular culture, post-colonialism, etc.

But in Eagleton's estimation there were also many serious mistakes, for instance: the assault on the normative and the insistence on the relativity of truth leaves us powerless to criticize oppression; the rejection of objectivity and (excessively) of all forms of essentialism bespeak an unrecognized idealism, or at least a blindness to our human materiality, ultimately born of an unconscious fear of death; and cultural studies has wrongly avoided consideration of ethics, which for Eagleton is inextricably tied to a proper politics.

Eagleton further writes, "Nor does [Dawkins] understand that because God is transcendent of us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to love us.

The huge numbers of believers who hold something like the theology I outlined above can thus be conveniently lumped with rednecks who murder abortionists and malign homosexuals.In April 2008 Eagleton delivered Yale University's Terry Lectures, with the title Faith and Fundamentalism: Is belief in Richard Dawkins necessary for salvation?, constituting a continuation of the critique he had begun in The London Review of Books.

[23] In late 2007, a critique of Martin Amis included in the introduction to a 2007 edition of Eagleton's book Ideology was widely reprinted in the British press.

In it, Eagleton took issue with Amis' widely quoted writings on "Islamism", directing particular attention to one specific passage from an interview with Ginny Dougary published in The Times on 9 September 2006.

Eagleton added there was "something rather stomach-churning at the sight of those such as Amis and his political allies, champions of a civilisation that for centuries has wreaked untold carnage throughout the world, shrieking for illegal measures when they find themselves for the first time on the sticky end of the same treatment.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a commentator for The Independent, wrote an article[26] about the affair, to which Amis responded via open letter, calling Eagleton "an ideological relict ... unable to get out of bed in the morning without the dual guidance of God and Karl Marx.

"[27] Amis said the views Eagleton attributed to him as his considered opinion was in fact his spoken description of a tempting urge, in relation to the need to "raise the price" of terrorist actions.

Howard wrote to The Daily Telegraph, noting that for a supposed "anti-semitic homophobe", it was peculiar that the only guests at the Howard–Amis nuptials were either Jewish or gay.

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.