Did it work? Students liked the satire - part of the appeal of Literary Theory was that at little cost in terms both of money and time, it armed them with a set of smart cynicisms with which they could affront their tutors. But even at the outset they were bored by the preaching. Very soon, literary theory itself seemed terribly vieux jeu. The new sport was in the history of the book, or even bibliography - subjects that would have seemed hopelessly empirical in 1983 and which didn't even register on the radar of Literary Theory. Students are never less than shrewd, even if their shrewdness often takes the form of merely consuming intellectual fashions with frightening speed, and they quickly discovered that literary theory, at least of the 20th-century variety, was desperately boring. It said the same things about every book in the most unlovely language. Here Eagleton's strategy, of disguising a polemic as a survey, bit back and theory's reversal of fortunes have hit Literary Theory hard. Given that Eagleton's book was written against literary theory, there is an injustice in this. But it is not an injustice over which one should shed many tears.

It was Lenin who said that the easiest way to destroy capitalism was to debauch the currency and Literary Theory: An Introduction was a Leninist attempt to debauch the intellectual currency of literary study. Outward success followed for its author. Eagleton was elected to a statutory chair at Oxford, from which he resigned to take up a chair at Manchester. The media have provided various soapboxes, from which he could pronounce on, for instance and most recently, Kingsley and Martin Amis, and the attacks on religion launched by Richard Dawkins. But Literary Theory: An Introduction failed and it trapped Eagleton's career in the mode of caricature. Although he has written many books since, Eagleton is still really Aquinas's "man of one book", of whom one should beware.