On How to Read Literature

I’ve heard Eagleton a number of times on podcasts and really like him, but this book took me a while to get into — largely because he comes at the subject as a literary theorist more than as a literary critic at large. Even so, his reading of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a while, and his evisceration of William McGonagall is absolutely brutal.