SOURCE: “Skull Caps,” in New Statesman, June 3, 1983, pp. 24-5.

In the following review, Hawkes offers positive assessment of Literary Theory.

As much goad as guide, Terry Eagleton's spirited introduction to literary theory [Literary Theory] has the sharp bite that only a trenchant and tough-minded argument can give. It puts an incisive and persuasive case: that in our society the discourses of literary criticism and of politics share a deep mutual involvement, so that to place something as ideologically sensitive as ‘English’ at the centre of a system of mass education implies and invokes relationships of real social power. Hence the urgency, the bitterness and the public interest in recent clashes over ‘structuralism’, ‘deconstruction’ and the like. At stake is not merely ‘English’, but the mysterious quality of Englishness: civilisation as we know it.

Eagleton puts his own cards firmly on the table and deals innocence out of the...