Grup 07 :

1. Qurrotul A’yun (200110101007)

2. Alissya Kamila Putri (200110101049)
3. Dea Regitadya (200110101086)
4. Gaby Maryam Q.F. (200110101089)
5. Aulia Ulin Tarisa (200110101090)
6. Annisa Mayangsari (200110101114)

Sociology of Literature by Terry Eagleton

Terrence Francis Eagleton, widely known as Terry Eagleton, is an English literary theorist,
critic, and public intellectual. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of English Literature at
Lancaster University. His specialties are literary and cultural theory and the English-language
literature and culture of Ireland, on which he has recently completed a trilogy of works. His work
has made an impact on the teaching of literary and cultural studies throughout Europe and in
almost every part of the world including China, Japan, India, Russia, Australia, Canada, and the
United States.

Born in a working-class family in England, Terry Eagleton was a Marxist literary theorist
and critic. His writing includes a wide range from the 19th and the 20th centuries to 1970s
Marxist tradition and from Marxist literary-cultural analysis to the need for theory. However, in
his writing, considers other critical trends that become compatible with his Marxism. This
compatibility becomes possible because modern literary theories are somehow a reaction against
the ideas of New Criticism such as literary texts are autonomous and self-contained.

Sociology of literature is one of the important aspects of Marxist criticism. It deals with
explaining a literary work more fully. This also includes the study of the form, style, and
meaning of literary works. Eagleton defines this process which deals with literary production,
distribution, and exchange in a particular society. It also focuses on the publication of books, the
author's status, and the reader’s literacy.

There are two main ways in which an interest in the sociology of literature can be justified.
The first form of justification is a realist: literature is deeply conditioned by its social context,
and any critical account of it which omits this fact is therefore automatically deficient. The
second way is a pragmatist: literature is shaped by all kinds of factors and readable in all sorts of
contexts, but highlighting its social determinants is useful and desirable from a particular
political standpoint.
 Both of these cases would seem to have something going for them. Hardly anybody would
want to deny that literature is in an important sense a social product, but this claim is so general
that a specifically "sociological treatment of literary works does not necessarily follow from it.
Metaphors and line endings, after all, are also in some sense social products, so that to attend to
these elements of a literary text is not necessarily to deny the work's sociality. "Social product"
would seem too comfortably broad a category, just as "economic product" would seem too
cripplingly narrow.

A problem with the realist case about the sociology of literature, then, is that it is not very
clear what exactly is being claimed. The pragmatist case would seem a persuasive rationale for,
say, a feminist reading of Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism since few people would want to
claim that the poem was in some central way about patriarchal relations in the sense that The
Rape of the Lock is. A Marxist critic who attended to questions of social class in Treasure Island,
perhaps placing Long John Silver in the context of the British shop stewards' movement.

To sum it up, Eagleton defines sociology of literature not only as an important aspect in
Marxist criticism which deals with the study of form, style, and meaning of literary works but
also as the process of literary production, distribution, exchange in a particular society, author's
status and the readers' literacy