SOURCE: “After the Revolution: Eagleton on Aesthetics,” in Contemporary Literature, Vol. XXXII, No. 4, Winter, 1991, pp. 573-79.

In the following review of The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Sprinker discusses Eagleton's aesthetic perspective in light of Hegelian philosophy, and finds contradictions in the political aspects of Eagleton's conclusions.

Having been a reasonably diligent observer of Terry Eagleton's career since the mid 1970s, I remain of two minds about the body of work that has poured forth since Criticism and Ideology—in my view, his most original and significant contribution to literary theory. On the one hand, I greatly admire (perhaps even envy a bit) his facility as a writer—not merely the speed with which he is able to compose provocative and important studies as various and wide-ranging as his books on Walter Benjamin, the history of English criticism, and Samuel Richardson's Clarissa; his still-unsurpassed introduction to contemporary literary theory...