Terry Eagleton

Terry Eagleton, perhaps the most prominent British critic of literature and culture today, was born in 1943 in Salford, England. He studied literature at Trinity College, University of Cambridge (M.A., Ph.D.), focusing on the 19th and 20th centuries, under the guidance of Raymond Williams, a representative of leftist literary criticism from the "New Left Review" magazine. He taught as a professor from 1992 to 2001 at Oxford (Thomas Wharton Professor of English Literature) and from 2001 to 2008 at the University of Manchester (John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature). In 2008, he was appointed Chair in English Literature at the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. He has authored more than 40 books. His most recent works include: "After Theory" (2003), "The English Novel: An Introduction" (2004), "Holy Terror" (2005), "How to Read a Poem" (2007), "The Meaning of Life" (2007), and "Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics" (2008), where he explores issues related to ethics and religion for the first time.