In this brilliant new critique, Terry Eagleton explores the beginnings, ambivalences, histories, subjects, fallacies and contradictions of postmodernism. Concerned less with recherche formulations of postmodern philosophy than with the culture or milieu, or even the sensibility, of postmodernism as a whole, he has in his sights, above all, a particular kind of student, or consumer, of 'popular' brands of postmodern thought.

Although Professor Eagleton's view of the topic is, as he says, generally a negative one, he draws attention equally to postmodernism's strengths as well as its failings. He sets out not just to expose the illusory, but, by subtly grounded argument, to show the students he has in mind that they never believed what they thought they believed in the first place.

In the process his devastating gifts for irony and satire sharpen the reader's pleasure, just as his commitment to the ethical and the vision of a just society inspire engagement and 'a refusal to acquiesce in the appalling mess which is the contemporary world'.