About this Item
1st Printing. Signed. 745 pages. Published in 1998. Massive collection of essays on subject. One of the greatest books of the 20th century. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now rare. Publisher's "Autographed Copy" round white sticker pasted in front. Presents Harold Bloom's "Shakespeare: The Invention of The Human". The crowning achievement of Bloom's genius: A 745-page celebration - "commentary" does not quite do justice in this context - of the one writer that he, very controversially, regards as the greatest literary artist of all time, the beginning, the middle, and the end of everything, in effect AND affect. The central narrative of Harold Bloom's life-work is the existential struggle between "authority" and "personality". Whether it's specifically between orthodoxy versus heresy, The Holy Bible versus The Book of J, normative Judaism and Christianity versus mystical Kabbalah/Gnosticism, "personality" is triumphant because it is more expressive, more subtle, and more multitudinous whereas "authority" inevitably becomes predictable, rigid, and ossified. The idea of "personality" is not just articulated, but sublimely dramatized by Bloom. He credits Shakespeare with inventing it, and devotes a definitive essay to each of the plays, emphasizing their "personality" and influence on all subsequent literature, feeling, and thought. "Before Bloom is done with us, he has made us wonder whether his vision of Shakespeare's influence on the whole of our lives might not simply be the sobering truth. A feast of arguments and insights, written with engaging frankness and affecting immediacy. Filled with literally thousands of insights" (Daniel Hintzsche). "The ultimate use of Shakespeare is to let him teach you to think too well and towards whatever truth you can sustain without perishing" (Harold Bloom). An absolute "must-have" title for Harold Bloom collectors. This Autographed Copy is very prominently and beautifully signed in black ink-pen on the publisher's tipped-in page by Harold Bloom. This title is a great book. As far as we know, this is the only such pre-signed copy of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing (American) available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. Please note: The publisher issued a limited number of pre-signed copies, which vanished from bookstores (within a day of their release in 1998). No such copies have resurfaced since, more than twenty years later (as of 2019), which means that collectors have held on to them. Copies available online have serious flaws, are subsequent printings, or are remainder-marked. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative. A rare signed copy thus. The greatest literary critic of our time on the greatest writer of all time. A fine collectible copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER HAROLD BLOOM TITLES IN OUR CATALOG) ISBN 1573221201. Seller Inventory # 19622
Bibliographic Details
Title: SHAKESPEARE: THE INVENTION OF THE HUMAN - ...
Publisher: New York City, NY: Riverhead Books, 1998
Publication Date: 1998
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: As New
Dust Jacket Condition: As New
Signed: Signed by Author
Edition: 1st Edition.
About this title
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is not simply a passionate defence of Shakespeare from what Bloom sees as the horrors of the "School of Resentment"--namely feminist, materialist and historicist accounts of the Bard. Bloom argues that Shakespeare, "by inventing what has become the most accepted mode for representing character and personality in language, thereby invented the human as we know it". So forget Marlowe or Jonson (dismissed on the first page), or even Michelangelo (although his Sistine Chapel adorns the book's dustjacket). Returning to the character analysis of his beloved Dr Johnson and A C Bradley, Bloom offers a play-by-play account of how Shakespeare defines the category of the human as we understand it, which is personified for Bloom by the characters of Hamlet and Falstaff (Bloom's self-confessed role model).
The result is at turns fascinating, controversial, provocative and downright bizarre. There are some wonderfully aphoristic insights: Rosalind (alongside Cleopatra one of the few female characters given much space in Bloom's argument) is "Jane Austen to Falstaff's Samuel Johnson", whilst Leontes in A Winter's Tale is "an Othello who is his own Iago". But the sheer scale of Bloom's central claim, reiterated again and again, leaves the book feeling repetitious and in thrall to its own verbal fireworks, which are often substituted for any sustained analysis of the originality of Shakespeare's language. This is a pity as so much space is given up throughout the book to wonderful passages from the plays.
Bloom's book should be welcomed for injecting debate and controversy into some of the prevailing orthodoxies of current Shakespeare criticism. But would a book whose author gleefully endorsed a colleague's horrified response that it would put Shakespeare studies back a hundred years have been welcomed by the visionary and forward-looking Bard? --Jerry Brotton
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
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