The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages - Softcover

Bloom, Harold

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573225142 ISBN 13: 9781573225144

Publisher: Penguin, 1999

Synopsis

More than a required reading list, The Western Canon is a major work of vision by the foremost literary critic in America. In defining the essential masterworks of world literature--the Western Canon--Bloom enlightens and inspires all readers to return to the special joys of reading that our literary tradition offers. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

About this title

Review:

"Heroically brave, formidably learned... The Western Canon is a passionate demonstration of why some writers have triumphantly escaped the oblivion in which time buries almost all human effort. It inspires hope... that what humanity has long cherished, posterity will also." -The New York Times Book Review

"This book is terribly important -- if you believe that literature itself is important, quite noble -- if you believe that 'nobility' is still a viable concept in intellectual life." --The Boston Globe

"Harold Bloom's large-minded and large-hearted book about the great books has many of the virtues that it sees and shows in the works he so fiercely admires." -Christopher Ricks, The Washington Times

"The list... is what will get all the attention, but it is the text preceding that provides the true pleasure." -Entertainment Weekly

"[Harold Bloom] has, in a quietly joyous fashion, the chutzpah to put his stamp on the whole of literature from Genesis to Ashbery, rivaling the scope of hero-critics like Sainsbury or Curtius or Auerbach though more giddily adventurous than they were... In one sense the hero of this book, as of all his books, is Bloom himself, modestly bold, genially polemical, dogmatically opposed to dogma, carrying to much in his head and always ready to say what he thinks about it all." -Frank Kermode, The London Review of Books

About the Author:

Harold Bloom is a Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. As The Paris Review has pointed out, "no critic in the English language since Samuel Johnson has been more prolific." His more than thirty books include The Best Poems of the English Language, The Art of Reading Poetry, and The Book of J. He is a MacArthur Prize Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, including the Academy's Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the International Prize of Catalonia, and the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico. Alfred Kazin has said, "Bloom is all literature, (he) positively lives it," and The New York Times called him "the most original literary critic in America." He lives in New Haven and New York.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1573225142
• ISBN 13: 9781573225144
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 546