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If you are one of those near-sighted, pedantic, theory-addicted lit-geeks (like myself, thank you) and you tire of trying to 'splain to folks the various -isms that spin out of the ivory tower and splat into the public square (who woulda thought that the word "deconstruct" would one day make regular appearances in Entertainment Weakly(sic)? "Not I" says this "I.") then this is THE book to pass out as a nice quick primer to strangers at the airport or, better yet, the one or two people who will still talk to you about books.

The coolest thing about this survey/overview is that as Eagleton goes through each of the lit-crit "movements" or "schools" he also makes a persuasive case for them. This makes the book engaging almost like a novel can be in that there is some drama as he leads the reader into one school, makes the reader think "Hmm, I like these ideas and would like to subscribe to the newsletter" before he then pulls at a few threads and then demonstrates what critics of that approach actually did, showing up its flaws and questionable assumptions and stuff, before Eagleton goes on to show what was reassembled from that mess into a new trend of thought which he gives the whole pitch for, before doing that again.

Yes, I know what you are thinking; your exact thoughts right now are "But wait, isn't he reifying the idea of intellectual 'evolution' by imposing a progress-narrative myth over disparate communities of cultural discourse as if they are elements within a linear strand of causally-connected events?"

Well duh.

And as one of the esteemed UK Gucci Marxists he should know better, right? But ya gotta start somewhere and for a book so brief he does an amazing job at pressing compact profiles onto the page with a minimum of distortion and enough impact to shut up people you know who say stupid shit like "Deconstruction is about how nothing means anything, right?" Now, I know some folx may balk at the idea of reading a "marxist," and that is a completely understandable and quite-to-be-expected reaction for capitalist bast people who daily struggle with seeing the world through a false consciousness (titter) but I don't think it colors his sketches in any meaningful way and certainly shouldn't impede understanding of his summaries of all these different critical approaches.

Now what approaches/schools/movements/factions/discourse-communities are these? Well let's see what we got here... you gotcher basic history of "English" as a proper subject for study in the first damn place and how shockingly tardy was its acceptance as a serious thang, then ya gotcher pre-New Criticism unpleasantness, 'course then ya gotcher actual New Criticism unpleasantness, then ya gotcher phenomenology guys and that whole debate about the in-your-head "in here" vs that whole "out there" deal and where the hell you put "intent" with all that, then ya gotcher sciency formalists, what with their semiotix and structuralism which you're really gonna wanna take a look at if ya like your categories and diagrams. Then ya gotcher deal where the previous machine turned on itself and got all AI on its own ass with the post-structuralists, then you can take a break on the couch with your psychoanalytic session. When you wake up and you realize you're almost done and you wonder "what about rhetoric?" he goes all rhet alright by blending that through feminism(s) and other political criticism(z).

And yes it's mostly a nice surface-scratching tour but if anyone wants to dig deeper his bibliography is phat.