James Cunningham, Trinity College, Carmarthen, Wales

In his primer Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976), Terry Eagleton defines Marxism as "a scientific theory of human societies and of the practice of reforming them."¹ Marxist criticism, he states, "analyses literature in terms of the historical conditions which produce it" (vi). The business of this criticism is "to understand ideologies—the ideas, values and feelings by which men experience their societies at various times," some of the ideologies of the past being accessible only in literature. An understanding of ideologies, it is argued, helps clarify the process of social control and "contributes to our liberation" (viii). Ideologies, as socially generated and historically relative ways of apprehending reality, are understood to reflect and underpin the status quo; or, as Eagleton puts it in a more sophisticated study, ideologies are "modes of feeling, valuing, perceiving, and believing which have some kind of relation to...