The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
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- "The Western Canon" redirects here, for the more general concept see Western canon
| The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Harold Bloom |
| Language | English |
| Subject(s) | Literature |
| Genre(s) | Literary criticism |
| Publisher | Harcourt Brace |
| Pages | 578 |
| ISBN | 9781573225144 |
The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages is a 1994 book by Harold Bloom on Western literature. Bloom defends the concept of the Western canon by focusing on 26 writers whom he sees as central to the canon:[1][2]
- Shakespeare
- Dante
- Chaucer
- Cervantes
- Montaigne
- Molière
- Milton
- Dr. Samuel Johnson
- Goethe
- Wordsworth
- Jane Austen
- Walt Whitman
- Emily Dickinson
- Charles Dickens
- George Eliot
- Tolstoy
- Henrik Ibsen
- Freud
- Proust
- James Joyce
- Virginia Woolf
- Franz Kafka
- Jorge Luis Borges
- Pablo Neruda
- Fernando Pessoa
- Samuel Beckett
The book argues against what Bloom calls the "School of Resentment", in which he includes Feminist literary criticism, Marxist literary criticism, Lacanians, New Historicism, Deconstructionists, and Semioticians. Norman Fruman wrote that "The Western Canon is a heroically brave, formidably learned and often unbearably sad response to the present state of the humanities".[3]
[edit] References
- ^ Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, 2
- ^ Reviewed by Ken Tucker (1994-10-21). "Book Review: 'The Western Canon: The Books and the School of the Ages'; Books". EW.com. http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,304173,00.html. Retrieved 2011-05-01.
- ^ The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/01/specials/bloom-canon.html.
