Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

Graham Allen (University College Cork)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1994

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Non-Fiction
- Commentary / Criticism (literary)

Resources

The Western Canon is the most important of Harold Bloom's recent books. Bloom's “recent” work can be traced back to Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1989), a text in which he decisively shifted his critical focus from an analysis of the anxiety of influence to the origins of that anxiety in the great authors of the Western tradition: the J-writer (the earliest Biblical author), Dante and above all Shakespeare. Bloom's The Western Canon is his most direct and sustained defence of the originality of the great writers within the Western literary tradition or Canon (Bloom goes so far in this text as to refer to world …

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2419 words

Citation: Allen, Graham. "The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 November 2002 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10619, accessed 04 December 2024.]

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