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Harold Bloom
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The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages Paperback – September 1, 1995

by Harold Bloom (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 410 ratings
See all formats and editions
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD

“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

Literary critic Harold Bloom's The Western Canon is more than a required reading list -- it is a vision. Infused with a love of learning, compelling in its arguments for a unifying written culture, it argues brilliantly against the politicization of literature and presents a guide to the great works of the western literary tradition and essential writers of the ages: the "Western Canon." Harold Bloom's book, much-discussed and praised in publications as diverse as The Economist and Entertainment Weekly, offers a dazzling display of erudition mixed with passion. For years to come it will serve as an inspiration to return to the joys of reading our literary tradition offers us.
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Previous page
  1. Print length
    560 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Riverhead Books
  4. Publication date
    September 1, 1995
  5. Dimensions
    6.06 x 1.2 x 8.98 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1573225142
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1573225144
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Discussed and debated, revered and reviled, Bloom's tome reinvigorates and re-examines Western Literature, arguing against the politicization of reading. His erudite passion will encourage you to hurry and finish his book so you can pick up Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens once again to rediscover their original magic. In addition, his appendix listing of the "future" canon - the books today that will be timeless tomorrow - is sure to be the template for future debate.

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

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Riverhead Books; First Riverhead Edition (September 1, 1995)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 560 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1573225142
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1573225144
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.3 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.06 x 1.2 x 8.98 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 410 ratings

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Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom

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Harold Bloom is a Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. 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.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
410 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Craig Matteson
5.0 out of 5 stars A tour of our foundational literature
Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2005
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Love him or hate him (I love him), Harold Bloom is one of the great readers of all time. He has personally read more widely and more deeply than some entire towns. It is certainly not necessary to agree with him to benefit from his insights and analyses. This book examines the notion that there was a body of writing that was central to Western Culture. Each generation read these works and was taught about these works as an essential part of the transmission of that cultural to each rising generation to keep it alive.

It not only enriched the lives of those so educated, it benefited the world because of the great values and life giving force of the rich ideas they contained. He notes how this notion has not only been rejected by recent generations of academics, but is now almost unknown in the living generations of people who would constitute Western Culture if they knew what it actually was.

He opens with an elegy to the Canon. The book is worth reading just for this essay. The next section examines authors of the Aristocratic Age. All Bloom readers know he is a worshipper of Shakespeare (he calls himself a Bardolater). He opens with an essay titled "Shakespeare: Center of the Canon". This section also includes essays on Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes (another Bloom favorite), Montaigne & Molière, Milton, Samuel Johnson, and Goethe. An impressive list, no?

The next section is the Democratic Age and includes essay son Wordsworth & Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, and Ibsen. The Chaotic age follows and includes Freud vis à vis Shakespeare, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Borges, and Beckett.

Obviously, none of these sections is comprehensive. These are only representative writers of the periods Bloom is discussing with us. The final section is Cataloging the Canon and begins with an Elegiac Conclusion. This essay urges that he is not offering us a lifetime reading plan. Rather, he offers us a way to read. He offers advice on how to immerse yourself in certain kinds of reading. He urges us to seek better writing and to develop a taste that will lead us away that which is not worth reading because it takes you away from that which is. He talks about how to develop the taste of a good Critic rather than spewing the politics of resentment or being numb to the great and good.

Bloom then provides extensive lists of works from each of the three periods. You may like to read some things on the list and not others. As I said, agreeing with Bloom is really not the point. It is being exposed to what is worthwhile in our cultural tradition and getting good grounding in why it is important that is critical. Our emphasis on practical education and vocational training has left most of us with insufficient time in school to indulge our cultural education. We have to do the work more or less on our own. This book can be a real help in making headway in that part of our personal education.

Thanks, Professor Bloom!
72 people found this helpful
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Craig Stoughton
5.0 out of 5 stars Bloom vs the Resentment
Reviewed in the United States on October 17, 2017
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The Divine Harold Bloom (as he uses the term for Oscar Wilde) here defends the Western Canon, and while so doing became the recipient of much undeserved criticism, from the likes of so-called New Historicists, gender theorists, Marxist interpreters, and devotees of the School of Resentment. Battle worn and unyielding in his belief in literature that matters, Bloom here is indefatigable. In this, a pillar of western literary criticism, Bloom lucidly lays out his argument for the Canon. I wont defend the Canon here in this review, Bloom does that way better than I ever could, but I will say I appreciate his heroism. I will relate to you that during my undergraduate and graduate pursuits in the field of English Literature at an esteemed University, I can honestly say that the Canon does indeed need a champion. A reader of classical literature since I was a child, I experienced shock and dismay when much of my coursework was taken up with studying literature that was focused on due to "cultural significance" without regard to aesthetic beauty or literary quality. Without naming names, when one goes into a course of study that one hopes will incorporate Shakespeare, Milton, Dante and Cervantes, or the gods of the field, I ended up enmeshed in courses that focused on cultural/socio-political fetishes, with topical, and therefor irrelevant, importance, to call it that. Twenty years later, I'm still reeling from classes focused on comic books and political pamphlets. So, as always, I stuck to what I deem important-literature that has universal significance-Joyce, Becket, Proust, Kafka, Faulkner, Lawrence and Crane for the moderns; Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Shelley, Dickens, Austen, Goethe, Mann, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne and James. Bloom, here as elsewhere, is a great guide for those of us who, due to the disintegration of the Academy, are forced into autodidactism. For those of us increasingly rare beings who search for where "wisdom might be found" in those authors where the muse speaks most evidently, this book is a great and treasured resource. Of the many accomplishments of this gem, Bloom allows us to become acquainted with these great writers and why they matter. One of the great regrets of my life is not having had the opportunity of surveying a course taught by Mr. Bloom at Yale or NYU, or better yet, sitting down and having a beer with the man and discussing poetry. I solace myself by reading his works incessantly and watching lectures and interviews on youtube (forgive me Mr. Bloom, I am as technologically adverse as you are, but I have to do what I have to do). This book, along with the Invention of the Human and The Daemon Knows, along with his other works, are my bibles in life as I unwaveringly search for wisdom in books, plays and poetry that have enriched my life and inner being immeasurably. Harold Bloom has had an incalculable impact on me as a living room scholar and on me as a person. Harold Bloom is, and will always be, a treasure great to behold.
253 people found this helpful
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Craig Chalquist, PhD, author of TERRAPSYCHOLOGY and DEEP CALIFORNIA
4.0 out of 5 stars for the love of literature
Reviewed in the United States on November 9, 2008
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I enjoyed Bloom's book because it succeeded in one of its chief aims: to inspire the reader to open or go back to the books he describes. His enthusiasm beams from every paragraph. He obviously loves literature, and this passion conveyed itself clearly to me, triggering like feelings.

However, his book also irritated me. I can overlook the constant use of his favorite words: "declined," "agon," "proleptic," and "exuberant." But the constant rantings about the "School of Resentment," which would be feminists, Marxists, Foucauldians, and multiculturalists who reduce literature to ideology, got on my nerves and struck me as its own brand of resentment. I wish Bloom would have stuffed it all into an appendix or saved it for a book I would not have had to purchase.
15 people found this helpful
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Hendrik Wall
5.0 out of 5 stars great book and timely arrival. Thank You.
Reviewed in Canada on May 15, 2021
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The book is a great overview of western developments.
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Alex
5.0 out of 5 stars Testo fondamentale
Reviewed in Italy on April 26, 2023
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Un testo fondamentale di letteratura comparata, un riferimento per comprendere le relazioni tra i grandi classici della letteratura. Da leggere e consultare, una guida vera.
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esandresmx
5.0 out of 5 stars Gran libro sobre el canon occidental
Reviewed in Mexico on December 11, 2017
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He leído tres capítulos, pero es evidnete que va con todo.
Bloom es claro y preciso para describir las obras máximas de Occidente, acuerdo con su estilo para definir qué es un clásico.
Sin embargo, la prevalencia de Shakespeare sobre Dante y Cervantes, no me ha copnvencido. Quizá me convenza al termianr el libro.
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Richard
5.0 out of 5 stars Iconic book arrived promptly
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 8, 2019
Verified Purchase
This book arrived promptly, well before the 4th December, and is in fine condition, with hardly any wear and tear. The small amount of pencilled notation is in no way intrusive.
My expectations have been met and this book will, I am sure, be very helpful for my own private study purposes.
One person found this helpful
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Satish Kamble
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best of our any spirited choices....
Reviewed in India on August 20, 2017
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Harold Bloom, a paragon among readers. He literally means what he writes and in the same way, this book is highly influential in learning the past of all literary emotions in a single pile. As a reader I relished his intelligence and scholarship and it sparkling on my mind. I really appreciate his effort of dragging all ages and literary sages into one well. I highly recommend this book for every literary aficionados.
2 people found this helpful
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