Pub: Terry Eagleton, THE TASK OF THE CRITIC.

Eagleton, Terry, and Matthew Beaumont. The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue. London: Verso, 2010. The Task of the Critic is a comprehensive volume of interviews, covering both Terry Eagleton's life and the development of his thought and politics. Erudite and anecdotal, Matthew Beaumont's - Senior Lecturer in English at UCL - keen questions track the course of Britain's most esteemed and formidable literary theorist. Chapters cover his childhood in Salford to his undergraduate years and early academic life, as well as his developing ideas on subjects as diverse as Politics and Aesthetics; New Left and the Church; Marxism and Feminism; Death and Love. Lively and insightful, this collection will appeal not only to those with an interest in Eagleton himself, but to all those interested in the evolution of radical politics, modernism, cultural theory, the history of ideas, sociology, semantic inquiry and the state of Marxist theory. His outspoken views on everything from the Establishment: Oxbridge is "full of people who were there largely because they could not conceivably be anywhere else, as some people can only be in top-security psychiatric institutions", to the Monarchy, which reportedly prompted Prince Charles to call him "that dreadful Terry Eagleton" are discussed, expanded and explained in context. For further information, visit: http://www.versobooks.com/books/cdef/ef-titles/eagleton_task_of_the_critic.shtml.