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: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), 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 (Birmingham 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

Save to Bookshelf

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 literature and a world Canon). The book focuses on twenty-six canonical…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

2419 words

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

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

Dates

Places

Genres and Modes

Resources

Save this article

Leave Feedback