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Abstract There have been recurrent emphases on “the commonplace English empiricism,” i.e. the distaste of the English for theory. These emphases have been concomitant with others on the dependency of English literary criticism on continental ‘influences’ throughout its history. Through a ‘genealogical’ reading of English literary criticism, this study attempts to rethink the terms in which the relation between English literary criticism and continental theory have been posed, recovering those moments which contest this unitary, homogeneous narrative. The study does so, however, not by contrapuntally positing a counter-argument but by exploring the possibility of such moments. For the sake of convenience, the study restricts this investigation of the genealogy of English literary criticism to two English literary critics; namely Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton. As such, this thesis will be a comparative study of critical theory, which draws extensively on the history of literary criticism. The study approaches the problem posed in terms of Edward Said’s “Travelling Theory” and Michel Foucault’s/Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of “genealogy |