"Literary Theory: An Introduction," by Terry Eagleton, is a useful and a readable book. I really enjoyed reading the first two essays. In "Introduction: What is literature  essay Eagleton explains the difficulty of defining literature and therefore of defining literary theory. He tries to define literature according to other critics' points of view. For Roman Jakobson, literature is a way of writing which represents an "organized" violence committed on ordinary speech. Eagleton continues with the history of Formalism as the application of linguistics and then the emergence of Stalinism that rejected the quasi-mystical symbolist dogmas which had influenced criticism before them. George Orwell clarifies the definition of literature as how somebody read not to the nature of work. This means just to read because you like the writer's way of writing without any attention to the content. John M. Ellis has a weird comparison between literature and "weed." Eagleton explains that linking literature to our own concerns may retain the values of the work over centuries. Eagleton sums up that literature is simply a social construction so literary theory is an artificial discipline. Literature also is an unstable category which varies greatly according to social, political and cultural circumstances. In "The Rise of English , Eagleton starts with the history of literature. The imagination and fantasy writing didn't take a place in the beginning of literature history. Literature was the reflection of religious and social morals. Literature was as ˜propaganda' which was used to spread social values. It also embodied the values of the upper classes. After eighteenth century, the aesthetic theory of literature starts to appear with the emerging of Romanticism. The rise of the symbol also came in this period. Eagleton also indicates that the growth of English studies in nineteenth century was caused by the failure of religion. According to "Theor