ABSTRACT
Eagleton’s insistence on the historical complexity and political usefulness of such ostensibly normative and traditional categories as ‘ideology’ and ‘aesthetics’ has also been influential for cultural criticism in general. His re-reading of these categories has been motivated above all by a desire to steer critics of contemporary culture away from what he perceives as the cultural relativism and political apathy of post-modernism (see modernism and post-modernism).
