After Theory

Tracing the rise and fall of theory from the 1960s to 1990s, Eagleton explores the cultural and political factors that brought it to birth, examining how path-breaking writers such as Barthes, Foucault, Lacan and Kristeva brought subjects like gender, power, sexuality and ethnicity out of the margins. He offers a candidassessment of the gains and lossess of cultural theory, rebutting many of the standard changes against it, but claiming also that it has been silent or evasive about a whole range of vital issues.

After Theory concludes with the dramatic suggestion that, in the face of a new global narrative of capitalism, postmodernism may now be dead. Instead, the areas that cultural theory has overlooked or denied -love, evil, death, morality, metaphysics, religion and revolution- must urgently be engaged with. As this impassioned, radical treatise on the modern age shows, they matter now more than ever.