Terry Eagleton’s “What is Literature?” from Literary Theory: An Introduction

Introduction 

We’re diving into a foundational question in literary studies: What is literature? This might seem like a straightforward question, but as Terry Eagleton argues in the introduction to his influential book Literary Theory: An Introduction, it’s anything but simple. Eagleton challenges us to rethink our assumptions about what makes a text "literary" and why certain works are valued over others. His argument is that literature isn’t a fixed, objective category like "insects" in biology—it’s a social construct, shaped by historical, cultural, and ideological forces. we’ll explore Eagleton’s critique of traditional definitions of literature, his engagement with Russian Formalism, and his provocative claim that what we call "literature" is deeply tied to social power and ideology. By the end, you’ll see why defining literature is not just an academic exercise but a window into how societies value texts and maintain power structures.

Let’s start with a question: How would you define literature? Take a moment to think—what makes a novel by Jane Austen "literature," but not a comic book or a grocery list? Eagleton’s answer might surprise you. Let’s unpack his arguments step by step.

1. Why Defining Literature Is So Hard 

Eagleton begins by questioning the assumption that literature can be easily defined. He explores several common approaches to defining it and shows why each falls short

Literature as Fiction or Imaginative Writing

One intuitive definition is that literature is "imaginative" writing—fiction, like novels or poetry, as opposed to factual texts like history or science. But Eagleton shows this doesn’t hold up. For example, 17th-century English literature includes not just Shakespeare’s plays or Milton’s Paradise Lost but also Francis Bacon’s essays, John Donne’s sermons, and even philosophical works like Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. In 19th-century England, Charles Lamb’s essays and Thomas Macaulay’s histories are considered literature, but Charles Darwin’s scientific writings or Karl Marx’s political treatises typically aren’t. Why? It’s not because the latter are "factual"—many "literary" texts, like Donne’s sermons, were intended as factual, while some fiction, like pulp novels or Superman comics, isn’t seen as literature.

Eagleton points out that the fact-fiction divide is historically shaky. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the word "novel" applied to both true and fictional stories. Early Icelandic sagas or the Book of Genesis blur the line between "historical" and "artistic" truth. Even today, a text like Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire might be read as literature for its style, not its facts, while a Mills & Boon romance novel, though fictional, is rarely granted literary status. So, fiction alone can’t define literature.

Literature as Creative Writing

Another attempt is to define literature as "creative" or "imaginative" writing, implying that history or science is uncreative. But this is problematic. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is imaginative in its conceptual scope, yet it’s not typically literature. Conversely, some realist novels, like those by Émile Zola, aim for factual accuracy over linguistic flair, yet are considered literary. Creativity isn’t a clear dividing line either.

The Problem with These Definitions

Eagleton’s point is that these definitions—fiction, imagination, creativity—rely on subjective distinctions that don’t consistently apply. They exclude texts we intuitively include as literature and include others we don’t. This leads Eagleton to explore a different approach: maybe literature isn’t about what texts are but about how they use language. Let’s turn to the Russian Formalists for this.

2. Russian Formalism: Literature as Linguistic Deviation 

Eagleton introduces the Russian Formalists, a group of critics active in Russia before and after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, including Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, and Boris Eichenbaum. They offered a radical new way to define literature, focusing on its language rather than its content. Let’s break down their ideas and Eagleton’s critique.

The Formalist View: Defamiliarization

The Formalists argued that literature is a "special" kind of language that performs an "organized violence on ordinary speech." In other words, literary language deviates from everyday language through devices like rhythm, metaphor, imagery, or narrative structure. This deviation creates what they called estrangement or defamiliarization—it makes the familiar strange, forcing us to see the world anew. For example, when John Keats writes, “Thou still unravished bride of quietness” in Ode on a Grecian Urn, the language’s rhythm and imagery grab our attention, unlike a mundane statement like “The bus is late.” This defamiliarization refreshes our perception, making us notice language and the world it describes in a new way.

Think of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry, with its dense, musical language—“Glory be to God for dappled things”—which slows us down and makes us hyper-aware of words. Or consider Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which the Formalist Shklovsky called “the most typical novel” because it constantly disrupts its own narrative with digressions, making us notice its structure rather than just its story.

Form Over Content

The Formalists prioritized form over content. They saw literature as a material object, like a machine, to be analyzed for its linguistic workings, not as a reflection of the author’s mind or social reality. For them, Don Quixote isn’t about the character but about the narrative techniques that hold the text together. Similarly, George Orwell’s Animal Farm isn’t an allegory of Stalinism but a formal exercise in allegory, with Stalinism just a convenient backdrop. This focus on form led to provocative claims, like Osip Brik’s quip that Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin would exist even if Pushkin hadn’t written it, because its form, not its author, defines it.

Eagleton’s Critique

Eagleton admires the Formalists’ focus on language but finds their definition flawed. The biggest issue is their reliance on "ordinary language" as a norm against which literature deviates. But what is ordinary language? It varies by context—class, region, culture. For example, the word “ginnel” (meaning alleyway) might sound poetic in London but is everyday speech in parts of northern England. There’s no single, universal “normal” language, so the idea of deviation is relative. Plus, many non-literary texts—advertisements, slang, even football chants—use devices like metaphor or rhythm, yet aren’t considered literature. Conversely, some literature, like realist novels, avoids flashy language yet is still valued as literary.

Eagleton also notes that any text can be read as “estranging” with enough effort. Take a mundane sign like “Dogs must be carried on the escalator.” You could analyze its staccato rhythm or imagine it as a metaphor for life’s burdens, but that doesn’t make it literature. The Formalists’ focus on linguistic deviation, while insightful, doesn’t fully capture what makes a text literary, especially since they often treated all literature as poetry, ignoring prose like realist novels that don’t prioritize linguistic self-consciousness.

3. Literature as Non-Pragmatic Discourse 

Eagleton explores another definition: literature as “non-pragmatic” discourse, meaning texts that don’t serve an immediate practical purpose, like a biology textbook or a shopping list. Instead, literature often generalizes about human experience. When a poet writes, “My love is like a red rose,” they’re not describing a specific person but love in general, using meter to signal this broader intent. This focus on the “way of talking” rather than the specific content might suggest literature is self-referential, drawing attention to its language.

But this definition has problems too. Some literature, like George Orwell’s essays on the Spanish Civil War, is valued for its truth-telling and practical relevance, not just its style. Moreover, whether a text is read non-pragmatically depends on the reader. For example, you might read a railway timetable not to catch a train but to reflect on modern life’s speed, treating it as literature. Conversely, you might read Robert Burns’s poetry to learn about 18th-century Scottish flora, not as literature. Eagleton’s point is that “literariness” isn’t inherent in the text—it’s about how we read it.

To illustrate, imagine a drunk on the London Underground misreading “Dogs must be carried on the escalator” as a profound statement about life’s responsibilities. By treating it as a cosmic generalization, they’re reading it “literarily,” but that doesn’t make the sign literature. This shows that literariness depends on context and reader interpretation, not just the text itself.

4. Literature as a Social Construct 

Eagleton’s central argument is that literature isn’t a fixed category with inherent qualities but a social construct, defined by how societies value and use texts. He compares “literature” to “weed”—weeds aren’t a specific type of plant but plants a gardener doesn’t want. Similarly, literature is writing that a society values highly, regardless of its specific features. Let’s explore this idea.

Value Judgments and Historical Variability

What counts as literature depends on value judgments, which change over time and place. A text like Shakespeare’s Hamlet is literature today, but in a future society with different values, it might seem irrelevant, like graffiti. Ancient Greek tragedies, which Karl Marx called “eternally charming,” might lose their appeal if we learned more about their original context and found it alien to our own. Eagleton imagines a scenario where new archaeological discoveries reveal that Greek tragedies were tied to concerns we no longer share, making them unappealing.

The “literary canon”—works like Shakespeare, Austen, or Dickens deemed timeless—isn’t universal but constructed by specific groups for specific purposes. For example, 19th-century critics elevated Lamb’s essays but not Bentham’s philosophy, reflecting their values. Some texts are “born” literary (e.g., poems), some “achieve” literariness (e.g., Gibbon’s history), and some have it “thrust upon them” (e.g., ancient texts valued for archaeological reasons). Literature, then, is about how people treat texts, not what the texts inherently are.

Reading as Rewriting

Eagleton argues that every society “rewrites” literary texts-By interpreting them through its own concerns. Our Shakespeare isn’t the same as the Elizabethans’ Shakespeare—we value different themes, like psychological complexity, that they might not have emphasized. This constant reinterpretation makes literature unstable, as its meaning and value shift with each new context.

5. Ideology and Social Power 

Eagleton’s most provocative claim is that the value judgments defining literature are tied to ideology—the beliefs and values that underpin social power structures. He uses I.A. Richards’s Practical Criticism (1929) to illustrate this. Richards asked students to evaluate anonymous poems, expecting subjective responses. But Eagleton notes that the students shared a “tight consensus” of assumptions about what literature should be, shaped by their context as young, white, upper-middle-class English students in the 1920s. Their judgments weren’t just personal tastes but reflections of deeper ideological frameworks.

For example, why are Lamb’s essays literature but not Marx’s writings? This reflects ideological choices about what kinds of discourse are privileged. Eagleton argues that all statements, even factual ones, carry value judgments. Saying “This cathedral was built in 1612” assumes it’s worth stating, that I’m qualified to say it, and that you’re worth telling. These assumptions are ideological, tied to social norms and power dynamics.

Literature, then, isn’t just about aesthetics—it’s about who gets to decide what’s valuable and why. In a society where certain groups hold power, their values shape the literary canon, excluding texts that challenge their authority. This makes literary studies not just a study of texts but of the social and ideological forces behind them.

6. Implications for Literary Studies 

Eagleton concludes that literature can’t be studied as a stable, objective entity, like insects in entomology. Instead, literary studies must examine how texts are valued, by whom, and for what purposes. He places “literature” under an “invisible crossing-out mark,” suggesting the term is provisional, useful only until we find better ways to understand texts. This challenges us to question the canon, to ask why certain texts are privileged, and to consider the social and ideological stakes of our reading practices.

For example, when we study Jane Austen, we’re not just analyzing her novels but engaging with how 19th-century England, and later societies, valued her work for its social commentary or style. This perspective opens up literary studies to broader questions about culture, power, and history.

Conclusion

Eagleton’s introduction is a wake-up call: literature isn’t a thing “out there” with fixed qualities—it’s a way of valuing and reading texts, shaped by social and ideological forces. By critiquing definitions based on fiction, linguistic deviation, or non-pragmatic discourse, he shows that literature is a dynamic, contested category. His discussion of Russian Formalism highlights the importance of language but also its limits, while his focus on ideology reveals how power shapes what we read and value.

As you think about this, consider: What texts do you value as literature, and why? Are those values personal, or do they reflect broader social norms? Let’s open it up for questions—how does Eagleton’s argument change the way you think about literature or literary studies? 

Crux of Each Chapter in Literary Theory: An Introduction

Introduction: What is Literature?

Crux: Eagleton challenges the notion that literature has a fixed, objective definition, arguing it is a social construct shaped by how texts are valued and read. He critiques attempts to define literature as fiction, imaginative writing, or linguistically deviant (e.g., via Russian Formalism’s “defamiliarization”), showing that these definitions fail to account for the diversity of texts considered literary (e.g., essays, sermons, novels). Literature’s status depends on cultural and historical contexts, not inherent qualities. Eagleton introduces the role of ideology, suggesting that what counts as literature reflects social power dynamics, as seen in the selective valuation of texts like Lamb’s essays over Marx’s writings. This sets the stage for analyzing literary theories as products of specific social and ideological conditions.

Key Idea: Literature is not a stable entity but a function of how societies interpret and value texts, deeply tied to ideology and power.

Chapter 1: The Rise of English

Crux: Eagleton traces the historical emergence of English literature as an academic discipline in 19th-century Britain, arguing it was shaped by ideological needs rather than neutral scholarship. Literature became a tool to cultivate moral and cultural values, particularly during the Industrial Revolution, when it was seen as a civilizing force for the working class and a means to reinforce national identity. Figures like Matthew Arnold promoted literature as a substitute for declining religious authority, while universities formalized its study to instill bourgeois values. Eagleton critiques this as an ideological project, masking class interests and marginalizing other forms of writing.

Key Idea: The study of English literature was institutionalized to serve social and political purposes, reflecting the power structures of its time.

Chapter 2: Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Reception Theory

Crux: This chapter explores phenomenological approaches, particularly those of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, which focus on the reader’s subjective experience of a text. Eagleton examines how these theories prioritize the act of interpretation (hermeneutics) and the reader’s role in constructing meaning, as seen in reception theory (e.g., Wolfgang Iser). While these approaches highlight the dynamic interaction between text and reader, Eagleton critiques their tendency to isolate literature from social and historical contexts, risking an overly subjective or ahistorical view. He argues that meaning is not just personal but shaped by cultural and ideological frameworks.

Key Idea: Phenomenological theories emphasize reader experience and interpretation but often neglect the social and political forces shaping texts and readings.

Chapter 3: Structuralism and Semiotics

Crux: Eagleton introduces structuralism, rooted in Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics, which views literature as a system of signs governed by underlying structures. Structuralists like Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss analyze texts for their formal patterns, not their content or authorial intent. Semiotics extends this to study how meaning is produced in all cultural artifacts, from novels to advertisements. Eagleton praises structuralism’s scientific rigor but critiques its detachment from historical and social realities, arguing it reduces literature to abstract systems, ignoring power and ideology.

Key Idea: Structuralism treats literature as a system of signs, offering a systematic approach but overlooking historical and ideological contexts.

Chapter 4: Post-Structuralism

Crux: Eagleton examines post-structuralism, particularly the work of Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, which challenges structuralism’s fixed systems by emphasizing the instability of meaning. Deconstruction reveals how texts undermine their own apparent meanings through contradictions and ambiguities. Post-structuralism celebrates the multiplicity of interpretations and questions the authority of texts, authors, and critics. Eagleton sees value in its skepticism but warns it can lead to a nihilistic view where meaning becomes too fluid, potentially disconnecting literature from political and social realities.

Key Idea: Post-structuralism highlights the instability of meaning and challenges textual authority, but risks detaching literature from concrete social struggles.

Chapter 5: Psychoanalysis

Crux: Eagleton explores psychoanalytic literary theory, drawing on Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, which interprets texts as expressions of unconscious desires, conflicts, and psychic structures. Freudian readings see literature as revealing repressed emotions, while Lacanian approaches focus on language and the formation of the self. Eagleton appreciates psychoanalysis’s depth in exploring human subjectivity but critiques its tendency to universalize psychological patterns, often ignoring class, gender, or historical contexts. He argues it can reduce texts to symptoms of individual psyches, sidelining broader social dynamics.

Key Idea: Psychoanalysis uncovers the unconscious dimensions of literature but can overemphasize individual psychology at the expense of social and historical factors.

Chapter 6: Political Criticism

Crux: In this chapter, Eagleton advocates for a Marxist approach to literary criticism, arguing that literature must be understood within its social, economic, and political contexts. He critiques earlier theories for their detachment from power structures and emphasizes that literature reflects and shapes ideological struggles. Drawing on Marxist thinkers like Louis Althusser, Eagleton sees texts as sites of class conflict and ideological production, not autonomous artworks. He calls for a politically engaged criticism that connects literature to the material conditions of society, challenging the liberal humanist view of literature as universal or apolitical.

Key Idea: Literature is inseparable from ideology and class struggle, requiring a politically engaged criticism to reveal its role in power dynamics.

Conclusion: The Future of Literary Theory

Crux: Eagleton reflects on the state of literary theory, arguing that it should move beyond academic debates to engage with real-world political struggles. He critiques the institutionalization of theory, which risks turning it into an elitist exercise detached from social change. As a Marxist, he advocates for a radical criticism that uses literature to challenge oppressive structures, emphasizing its potential to critique ideology and foster social transformation. He calls for literary studies to align with broader emancipatory projects, rather than remaining confined to the academy.

Key Idea: Literary theory should be a tool for political and social change, connecting texts to the material struggles of society rather than existing as an academic abstraction.