The Western Canon

The Books and School of the Ages

Harold Bloom

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780547546483
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The literary critic defends the importance of Western literature from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Kafka and Beckett in this acclaimed national bestseller.

NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
Harold Bloom's  The Western Canon is more than a required reading list—it is a "heroically brave, formidably learned" defense of the great works of literature that comprise the traditional Western Canon. 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 essential writers of the western literary tradition ( The New York Times Book Review).

Placing William Shakespeare at the "center of the canon," Bloom examines the literary contributions of Dante Alighieri, John Milton, Jane Austen, Emily Dickenson, Leo Tolstoy, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Pablo Neruda, and many others. Bloom's book, much-discussed and praised in publications as diverse as  The Economist and  Entertainment Weekly, offers a dazzling display of erudition and passion.

"An impressive work…deeply, rightly passionate about the great books of the past."—Michel Dirda, The Washington Post Book World

Index

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | Y | Z

Adorno, Theodor, 511

Ammons, A. R., 285, 289, 522

Angelou, Maya, 16

Aquinas, St. Thomas, 81, 83

Ariosto, Ludovico, 2, 135

Aristophanes, 17, 158, 183

The Frogs, 227

Aristotle, 10, 183

Artaud, Antonin, 32

Ashbery, John, 39, 265, 272, 285, 289, 520–21, 522, 527

Atherton, James S., 423

Auden, W. H., 16, 77, 356, 358–59, 447

Auerbach, Erich, 36, 80, 128–29, 145

Augustine, St., 81, 83, 89, 99, 104, 496

Confessions, 84

Austen, Jane, 2, 240, 247, 253–63, 299, 329, 419, 436

Chaucer and, 111

Eliot (George) and, 330

Emma, 254, 260

Johnson and, 257, 262–63

Mansfield Park, 254, 257, 258

Persuasion, 240, 253–63

Pride and Prejudice, 253, 262, 434

Shakespeare and, 255–56

Woolf and, 434–35

Wordsworth and, 256, 259, 260, 263

Babel, Isaak, 337, 465

Bacon, Sir Francis, 374

Baddeley, J. F., 337, 340, 342

Bair, Deirdre, 501

Balzac, Honoré de, 2, 141, 320, 410, 500

Barber, C. L., 255–56

Barolini, Teodolinda, 95

Barrenechea, Ana Maria, 470–71

Barthes, Roland, 39

Bate, Walter Jackson, 186, 189, 200

Baudelaire, Charles, 2, 36, 410

Bayley, John, 345, 346, 348

Beckett, Samuel, 2, 7, 30, 39, 75, 80, 138, 1...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Preface and Prelude
• On the Canon
• An Elegy for the Canon
• The Aristocratic Age
• Shakespeare, Center of the Canon
• The Strangeness of Dante: Ulysses and Beatrice
• Chaucer: The Wife of Bath, The Pardoner, and Shakespearean Character
• Cervantes: The Play of the World
• Montaigne and Molière: The Canonical Elusiveness of the Truth
• Milton’s Satan and Shakespeare
• Dr. Samuel Johnson, the Canonical Critic
• Goethe’s Faust, Part Two: The Countercanonical Poem
• The Democratic Age
• Canonical Memory in Early Wordsworth and Jane Austen’s Persuasion
• Walt Whitman as Center of the American Canon
• Emily Dickinson: Blanks, Transports, the Dark
• The Canonical Novel: Dickens’s Bleak House, George Eliot’s Middlemarch
• Tolstoy and Heroism
• Ibsen: Trolls and Peer Gynt
• The Chaotic Age
• Freud: A Shakespearean Reading
• Proust: The True Persuasion of Sexual Jealousy
• Joyce’s Agon with Shakespeare
• Woolf’s Orlando: Feminism as the Love of Reading
• Kafka: Canonical Patience and “Indestructibility”
• Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa: Hispanic-Portuguese Whitman
• Beckett . . . Joyce . . . Proust . . . Shakespeare
• Cataloging the Canon
• Elegiac Conclusion
• Appendixes
• A.
• B.
• C.
• D.
• Index
• About the Author