Political Implication of Aesthetics

Terry Eagleton is an outstanding critic on contemporary Western Marxism. Political criticism and ideology are two important topics in his academic research, and consistently permeate his all theories. Eagleton multi-structurally analyzed ideology, and he said: "I denote by this the specific aesthetic region of General Ideology (GI), articulate with other such regions - the ethical, religious and etc. - in relations of dominance and subordination determined in the last instance by General Mode Production (GMP).". This book chooses the specific aesthetic region of GI - aesthetic ideology as study subject, and it carries out the academic research on political implication of aesthetic ideology. Eagleton walks into the fields of cultural studies and cultural criticism from the study on literature. His cut-point to study ideological function of aesthetics is British literature, which represents the characteristic of Marxism political criticism. "Aesthetic ideology is an internally complex formation, including a number of sub-sectors, of which the literature is one.". So the book discusses literature as special ideology and literature as production of ideology.