Scholars and Rebels must be essential reading for all those concerned to understand not just the complexities of nineteenth-century Irish intellectual culture and the emergent Irish Revival, but the formation also of Irish culture in the twentieth century.

Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands Fellow at the University of Manchester. His new book forms the final part of a trilogy with Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1995) and Crazy John the Bishop (1998). His numerous works also include The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996), Literary Theory. An Introduction (Second Edition, 1996) and The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), all available from Blackwell Publishers, as are Eagleton's dramatic writings St Oscar and other Plays (1997) and a collection of his essential writings, The Eagleton Reader (1997), edited by Stephen Regan.