Professor of Cultural Theory and the John Rylands Fellow at the University of Manchester, Terry Eagleton is considered by many to be the world’s leading literary critic. He is the author of numerous books, including Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983); The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990); The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996); The Idea of Culture (2000); Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (2002); and After Theory (2003). He has also written several books on Irish culture, a memoir of his childhood, five plays, a novel, a screenplay, and works for BBC TV and radio.