SOURCE: A review of Ideology, in Notes and Queries, Vol. 43, No. 1, March, 1996, pp. 119-21.

In the following excerpted review, Cooper offers tempered analysis of Ideology, which he contrasts with Leonard Jackson's The Dematerialisation of Karl Marx.

Eagleton and [Leonard] Jackson have produced two books that it is tempting to read as symptomatic of the state of Marxist literary theory in the 1990s at a time when ‘world Communism has collapsed’, (Jackson). Eagleton's anthology of extracts from eighteen writers [Ideology] takes its title from the claim that ideology is indeed the major concern of twentieth-century Marxist and Post-Marxist theory; for Jackson, on the other hand, Eagleton is classed as a bogeyman of English departments for precisely the reason that he and other ‘Althusserians’ have shifted attention away from the economic materialism of Marx's original writings, and have thereby ‘dematerialised’ not only Marx and Engels but the whole study of...