The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
By
 Harold Bloom (1930-2019)

Harcourt Brace & Company
New York
1994

viii, [4], 578 p.; 24 cm. (9.5 inches). Brown cloth, with gilt-stamped spine title. Glossy, color illustrated dust jacket, featuring The Last Judgment (detail) by Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel.  Includes Appendix A: The Theocratic Age; Appendix B: The Aristocratic Age; Appendix C: The Democratic Age; Appendix D: The Chaotic Age: A Canonical Prophecy; and Index.  Orange-brown endpapers.

First Edition, First Printing

"Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism.
Insisting instead upon 'the autonomy of the aesthetic,' Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon. Shakespeare has become the touchstone for all writers who come before and after him, whether playwrights poets or storytellers. In the creation of character, Bloom maintains, Shakespeare has no true precursor and has left no one after him untouched. Milton, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Ibsen, Joyce, and Beckett were all indebted to him; Tolstoy and Freud rebelled against him; and Dante, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, Whitman, Dickinson, Proust, the modern Hispanic and Portuguese writers Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa are exquisite examples of how canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. Bloom concludes this provocative, trenchant work with a complete list of essential writers and books - his vision of the Canon" [from the dust jacket]

ISBN: 0151957479

Book is in Near Fine Condition: pages bright, clean, tight, and unmarked; very tiny vertical scratch on bottom outside page edges near the spine.
Dust Jacket is in Very Good Plus Condition: light creasing both ends of the spine and light soiling on the inside of the back flap.



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