The "Church" of Literature: Unpacking Terry Eagleton’s The Rise of English
In his classic 1983 essay The Rise of English (a chapter from his book Literary Theory: An Introduction ), Eagleton delivers a thunderous revisionist history of how our discipline came to be. And if you’re looking for a PDF of this text to annotate until your highlighter runs dry, you’re in for a bracing read—because Eagleton argues that English Literature wasn’t born out of a love for art, but out of a crisis of control.
If you have searched for , you are likely a student of literature, cultural studies, or critical theory. You are not merely looking for a scanned chapter; you are looking for a foundational text that explains why you are studying English literature in the first place.
Here's a summary: