Harold Bloom

At a time when faster and easier electronic media threaten to eclipse reading and literature, the author explores reasons for reading and demonstrates the aesthetic pleasure reading can bring.

How to Read and Why

Sterling Professor of the Humanities Harold Bloom

Prof. Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence has cast its own long shadow of influence since it was first published in 1973. Through an insightful study of Romantic poets, Bloom puts forth his central vision of the relations between tradition and the individual artist. Although Bloom was never the leader of any critical "camp," his argument that all literary texts are a response to those that precede them had an enormous impact on the practice of deconstruction and poststructuralist literary theory in this country. The book remains a central work of criticism for all students of literature and has sold over 17,000 copies in paperback since 1984. Written in a moving personal style, anchored by concrete examples, and memorably quotable, Bloom's book maintains that the anxiety of influence cannot be evaded--neither by poets nor by responsible readers and critics. This second edition contains a new Introduction, which explains the genesis of Bloom's thinking and the subsequent influence of the book on literary criticism of the past twenty years.criticism of the past twenty years. Here, Bloom asserts that the anxiety of influence comes out of a complex act of strong misreading, a creative interpretation he calls "poetic misprision." The influence-anxiety does not so much concern the forerunner but rather is an anxiety achieved in and by the story, novel, play, poem, or essay. In other words, without Keats's reading of Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, we could not have Keats's odes and sonnets and his two Hyperions. Given the enormous attention generated by Bloom's controversial The Western Cannon, this new edition is certain to find a readymade audience among the new generation of scholars, students, and layreaders interested in the Bloom cannon.

A Theory of Poetry

The Anxiety of Influence

Selections from critical essays written by leading scholars provide accessible explorations of Harper Lee's classic.

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird

In arguably his most personal and lasting book, America's most daringly original and controversial critic gives us brief, luminous readings of more than eighty texts by canonical authors-- texts he has had by heart since childhood. Gone are the polemics. Here, instead, in a memoir of sorts--an inward journey from childhood to ninety--Bloom argues elegiacally with nobody but Bloom, interested only in the influence of the mind upon itself when it absorbs the highest and most enduring imaginative literature. He offers more than eighty meditations on poems and prose that have haunted him since childhood and which he has possessed by memory: from the Psalms and Ecclesiastes to Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson; Spenser and Milton to Wordsworth and Keats; Whitman and Browning to Joyce and Proust; Tolstoy and Yeats to Delmore Schwartz and Amy Clampitt; Blake to Wallace Stevens--and so much more. And though he has written before about some of these authors, these exegeses, written in the winter of his life, are movingly informed by "the freshness of last things." As Bloom writes movingly: "One of my concerns throughout Possessed by Memory is with the beloved dead. Most of my good friends in my generation have departed. Their voices are still in my ears. I find that they are woven into what I read. I listen not only for their voices but also for the voice I heard before the world was made. My other concern is religious, in the widest sense. For me poetry and spirituality fuse as a single entity. All my long life I have sought to isolate poetic knowledge. This also involves a knowledge of God and gods. I see imaginative literature as a kind of theurgy in which the divine is summoned, maintained, and augmented."

Subtitle TK

Possessed by Memory

A collection of key works of English language poetry encompasses works that have been written over the course of six centuries and shares some of the selector's critical reflections from the past half century.

From Chaucer Through Frost

The Best Poems of the English Language

Bloom offers meditations on forty-eight essential works of fiction that span the Western canon. While considering each novels' strengths and shortcomings, he also explains where and why he differs with other critics' assessments. In doing so, he guides readers to a new understanding of the novels, and in the importance and power of fiction. -- adapted from jacket and from reviews on Amazon

Novels to Read and Reread

The Bright Book of Life

In this fascinating work of religious criticism, Harold Bloom examines a number of American-born faiths: Pentecostalism, Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism, Christian Science, Jehovah's Witnesses, Southern Baptism and Fundamentalism, and African American spirituality. He traces the distinctive features of American religion while asking provocative questions about the role religion plays in American culture and in each American's concept of his or her relationship to God. Bloom finds that our spiritual beliefs provide an exact portrait of our national character.

The American Religion

What is genius? It is the trait, says Harold Bloom, of standing both of and above an age, the ancient principle that recognizes and hallows the God within us, and the gift of breathing life into what is best in every living person. Now, in a monumental achievement of scholarship, America's preeminent literary critic presents an unprecedented celebration of one hundred of the most creative literary minds in history. From the Bible to Socrates, through the transcendent masterpieces of Shakespeare and Dante, down through the ages to Hemingway, Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison, Harold Bloom explores the many parallels among his chosen geniuses and the surprising ways in which they have influenced one another over the centuries. Accompanied by revealing excerpts from their works that continue to astonish, enchant, and move readers, Bloom's insightful and spirited analyses illuminate and enlarge our common understanding of Western literary and spiritual culture...and offer us a grand yet intimate tour of it in one magnificent volume.

A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds

Genius

Journeying from the Bible to twentieth-century writings, the author explores how literature can shape one's life, discussing such topics as the Book of Job and Ecclesiastes, Plato and Homer, St. Augustine, and Freud and Proust.

Where Shall Wisdom be Found?

Written by Sophocles around 425 BCE, "Oedipus Rex" is a classic Greek tragedy that depicts the struggle between man and fate. Oedipus' story forms the foundation for the symbolic conflict between sons and fathers, a theme that has lost none of its dramatic punch in the ensuing centuries. The meticulous scholarship presented in this new "Bloom's Guides" title offers its readers fresh insight into this time-honored classic.

Oedipus Rex

Presents a collection of critical essays on Bradbury's novel, Fahrenheit 451.

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451

Shadow of a great book

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sterling Professor of Humanities Harold Bloom

GERALD AUTOR BLOOM

At a time when faster and easier electronic media threaten to eclipse reading and literature, the renowned literary critic explores reasons for reading, offering inspirational analyses of seminal works of literature, and demonstrates the aesthetic pleasure reading can bring. 150,000 first printing.

How to Read and why

A critical review of the work features the contributions of J. B. Priestly, William Empson, Will Brooker, and other scholars, discussing the themes and characters of the novel.

Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Presents a collection of essays analyzing Angelou's story, I know why the caged bird sings. Also includes a chronology of events in the author's life.

A Casebook

Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Writers of English Lives and Works (Writers of English)

Classic Horror Writers

An overview of the play features a biographical sketch of the author, a list of characters, a summary of the plot, and critical and analytical essays about the work.

Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

Our foremost literary critic celebrates the American pantheon of great writers from Emerson and Whitman to Hurston and Ellison, to Ursula K. LeGuin, Philip Roth, and Thomas Pynchon. Harold Bloom is our greatest living student of literature, "a colossus among critics" (The New York Times) and a "master entertainer" (Newsweek). Over the course of a remarkable career spanning more than half a century, in such best-selling books as The Western Canon and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, he transformed the way we look at the masterworks of western literature. Now, in the first collection devoted to his illuminating writings specifically on American literature, Bloom reflects on the surprising ways American writers have influenced each other across more than two centuries. The American Canon gathers five decades of Bloom's essays, occasional pieces, and introductions as well as excerpts from several of his books, weaving them together into an unrivalled tour of the great American bookshelf. Always a champion of aesthetic power, Bloom tells the story of our national literature in terms of artistic struggle against powerful predecessors and the American thirst for selfhood. All of the visionary American writers who have long preoccupied Bloom--Emerson and Whitman, Hawthorne and Melville, and Dickinson, Faulkner, Crane, Frost, Stevens, and Bishop--are here, along with Hemingway, James, O'Connor, Ellison, Hurston, LeGuin, Ashbery and many others. Bloom's enthusiasm for these American geniuses is contagious, and he reminds us how these writers have shaped our sense of who we are, and how they can summon us to be yet better versions of ourselves.

Harold Bloom

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