Terry Eagleton (b. 1943) was born in Salford, England, and
             educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became the
             student and disciple of Marxist literary critic Raymond Williams,
             who, like Eagleton, came from a rural working-class family of
             Celtic origin. He earned his doctoral degree at Trinity at the
             age of 21, and has been a tutor of English at Wadham College,
             Oxford.

             Since the death of Williams in 1988, Eagleton has been
             regarded as the premier British Marxist literary critic. His
             Marxism has gone through three distinct phases. In the first
             phase he tried to reconcile Williams's humanist Marxism with
             the values of his own Roman Catholic upbringing. Five years
             later he rejected the humanist Marxism in favor of a
             post-Althusserian "science of the text." His position shifted
             again after another five-year hiatus, when he called for a
             "revolutionary criticism" that explicitly seeks practical social
             goals as the end of literary study rather than mere knowledge
             of the text.

             His latest works include The Significance of Theory (1990),
             and Heathcliff and the Great Hunger ( 1995).