SOURCE: “Spud Bashing,” in New Statesman and Society, June 16, 1995, pp. 37, 39.

In the following review, Morgan offers unfavorable assessment of Heathcliff and the Great Hunger.

Terry Eagleton is a professor of English at Oxford; Roy Foster the professor of Irish history there. Last year, Eagleton launched a violent attack on his colleague, accusing Foster, and Irish historians, of revisionism. There was also a pre-emptive strike against Foster's current project, the biography of W. B. Yeats. Eagleton accused him of raiding literature in a “reductive” manner, “paying only passing attention to the politics and poetics of form”.

Now, with Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, Eagleton has continued the offensive with his great coat-trailing work on Irish history. At once the application of cultural theory to Ireland, and the insertion of Irish history into literary criticism, this set of essays intersperses slabs of impressionistic analysis of Victorian Ireland with studies of...