The Western Canon: The Books and School of the AgesHarold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism. Insisting instead upon "the autonomy of the aesthetic, " Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon. Shakespeare has become the touchstone for all writers who come before and after him, whether playwrights poets or storytellers. In the creation of character, Bloom maintains, Shakespeare has no true precursor and has left no one after him untouched. Milton, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Ibsen, Joyce, and Beckett were all indebted to him; Tolstoy and Freud rebelled against him; and Dante, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, Whitman, Dickinson, Proust, the modern Hispanic and Portuguese writers Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa are exquisite examples of how canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. Bloom concludes this provocative, trenchant work with a complete list of essential writers and books - his vision of the Canon. |
Contents
Preface and Prelude I | 1 |
The Countercanonical | 9 |
An Elegy for the Canon | 15 |
Copyright | |
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aesthetic Alceste ambivalence American anxiety Austen authentic Beatrice Beckett become Borges called Cervantes character Chaucer Christian Comedy comic consciousness critics cultural Dante Dante's death Dickinson Don Quixote dramatic Edmund Eliot Emerson Endgame essay Falstaff father Faust Feminist figure Freud Freudian Ginés Gnostic Goethe Goethe's Hadji Murad Hamlet Hamm hero Homer human Iago Ibsen imagination immortality invented irony jealousy John Johnson Joyce Joyce's Kafka King Lear lago literary literature live Macbeth madness matters metaphor Milton Molière Montaigne Montaigne's moral nature Neruda never Nietzsche novel novelist original Othello Paradise Lost Pardoner passion Peer Gynt perhaps personality Petrarch pilgrim play poet poetic poetry pragmatic precursor Proust reader Resentment Sancho Satan seems Selected Poems sense sexual Shake Shakespeare social speare spirit story sublime T. S. Eliot Tolstoy Tolstoy's tragedy translated truth Ulysses vision Western Canon Whitman Wife of Bath Woolf Wordsworth writer