Chaucer was a class traitor Shakespeare hated the mob Donne sold out a bit later Sidney was a nob. - Terry Eagleton

Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.

What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism.

The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which this case is becoming truer as time passes.