Terry Eagleton's book, in this vital new series from Blackwell, focuses on discriminating different meanings of culture, as a way of introducing to the general reader the contemporary debates around it.

Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands Fellow at the University of Manchester. His numerous works include The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996), Literary Theory: An Introduction (second edition , 1996), The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) and Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth Century Ireland (1999), all published by Blackwell, as are his dramatic writings, St Oscar and Other Plays (1997), and the Eagleton Reader (1997) edited by Stephen Regan. Terry Eagleton is co-editor (with Stephen Regan) of The Blackwell Companion to Literary Theory, forthcoming in 2001.