Literary critic and theorist Terry Eagleton began his career with a controversial article in Slant, the journal of the Catholic left, which connected the ceremony of benediction with the ways of capitalism. Eagleton went on to become known as an influential Marxist and Catholic thinker, with an extensive list of publications. He became influenced by post-structuralist thought in the late 1970s, though he criticised it for its denial of objectivity and material interests, especially class interests.
In Criticism and Ideology (1976), Eagleton embarked on an anti-Hegelian Marxism that critiqued British critical tradition (particularly F.R. Leavis and Raymond Williams) and re-evaluated the development of the English novel. In this work he provides a general framework for understanding the relation between the literary text and the social world. (He was later to modify his position in Walter Benjamin or Towards A Revolutionary Criticism (1981) after a consideration of post-structuralist theory). Eagleton examined the relationship between literature and ideology. He posits that the text may appear to be free in its relation to reality (that is, to invent characters and situations) but it is not free in its use of ideology (ideology meaning systems of representation which shape the individual's picture of lived experience). He rejects Althusser's view that literature can distance itself from ideology; it is a complex reworking of already existing ideological discourses. However, literature produces rather than reflects ideology. Therefore, criticism is concerned with the production of ideological discourses as literature.
In Shakespeare and Society (1967) Eagleton is concerned with breaking down the distinctions between individual and society, and between life and social structure. An often-used quotation from this text is “What we judge in the plays as relevant, what we actually see, is shaped by what we see in our own culture, in ourselves”. Eagleton then returns to the novel with Exiles and Émigrés (1970). Here he discusses the realist novel as reproducing history and social relations, and also extends the view of modernism by bringing colonialism, Englishness, and exile to bear on the meanings and values of modernism.
Eagleton's 1977 essay “Marxist Literary Criticism” shows the beginnings of his discontent with realist aesthetics and structuralism as a tool for literary criticism, and he begins to look for another way of considering the structural relations between literature and history. He then shifts to the idea of literature as a social practice and to ways of determining the ideological conditions under which the literary work is produced. This shift is particularly evident in Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976).
In what is regarded as his best work, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (1981), Eagleton questions the relation between socialist cultural theory and cultural practice, and the bearing these have on revolutionary politics. He also recognises and values feminist criticism.