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Contemporary Cultural Theory

a kind of ‘political criticism’ that will go beyond the limits of the
institution (Eagleton, 1996). This argument is resumed in The
Function of Criticism. In both books, the stress falls on the insti-
tutional production of criticism, as it had for Williams. In both,
too, the category of ‘Literature’ is radically decentred (pp. 16, 197;
Eagleton, 1996a, pp. 107–8), as it also had been for Williams. In
the latter book, moreover, Eagleton specifically invoked Williams
as ‘the most important critic of post-war Britain’, whose concept
of ‘structure of feeling’ he deemed ‘vital’ in ‘examining the articu-
lations between different sign-systems and practices’ (Eagleton,
1996a, pp. 108–10).
Eagleton’s writing of the 1990s can be seen as redeploying and
reapplying a whole set of essentially Williamsite categories to
distinctly un-English contexts. The Ideology of the Aesthetic is an
attempt at a critical history of the concept of the aesthetic, as it
has evolved in modern, mainly German thought, from Baum-
garten to Habermas. The central purpose of Eagleton’s argument
here was to recover both the negative and the positive moments
within the ‘aesthetic’ tradition. The obvious, but little remarked
upon, point of comparison is with Williams’ own account of the
English ‘culturalist’ tradition in Culture and Society: as Eagleton
notes, and as we have suggested in our own account, ‘the Anglo-
phone tradition is in fact derivative of German philosophy’
(Eagleton, 1990, p. 11). Eagleton’s Heathcliff and the Great Hunger
can also be read as a reworking of Culture and Society, taking Irish
literature rather than German philosophy as its primary object.
So Eagleton traces the differences between English and Irish
writing, showing how Williams’ own keyword, ‘Culture’, has
been differently troped against ‘Nature’; and, more specifically,
how Irishness itself has been troped as Nature to English Culture.
So too he re-places many of the thinkers from Williams’ ‘culture
and society tradition’—Burke, Shaw and Wilde—in relation to the
quite different Irish ‘tradition’ running from Swift to Joyce and
Yeats. These studies in Irish culture build on Williams’ work in
at least two respects: first, in their understanding of how English-
ness and Irishness have been defined and constructed, in
relation to and against each other, through the processes and
projects of hegemony; and second, in their insistence that cultural

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