Eagleton introduces us ininto the world of a polemical study of contemporary literary theory.
He explains that isit is difficult to define literature. There are « various attempts to define literature»literature.
One of them is that literature is imaginative writing, based on its fiction and does not engage in the truth.
However, Eagleton rejects this theory, because the literature also includes non-fiction genres such as essay and autobiographies. Eagleton argues that as long as the public considers factual works as literature, the claim that literature is fiction cannot hold. For instance, Eagleton cites certain books in the Genesis, written purportedly as a historical, factual document as being today read as both fact and fiction.


After exposing the holes in the particular definition of literature as fiction, Eagleton moves to his second definition, literature as defined by Russian Formalism. He claims that if literature is not defined as fictional, one can still claim the estrangement of writing, in particular, the estrangement of language, to be something that ‘transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech'. It is with this definition that Eagleton links literature to Russian Formalism.
He explains that instead of focusing on the meaning of a text, Formalists whom Eagleton describes as ‘a militant, polemical group of critics, focused on the structure, the language, of the text.’ «PerhapsPerhaps literature is definable not according to whether it is fictional or 'imaginative', but because it uses language in peculiar ways.»
There are several ways the Formalists saw how the language, the structure, and the form shape a text.

First, Eagleton states that, to the Formalists, a text was only as good as its literary devices.
On the other hand, the Formalists defined this estranging “literary language as a set of deviations from a norm, a kind of linguistic violence” that.