The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

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 was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. TABLE OF CONTENTS: Preface and Prelude I. On the Canon 1. An Elegy for the Canon II. The Aristocratic Age 2. Shakespeare, Center of the Canon 3. The Strangeness of Dante: Ulysses and Beatrice 4. Chaucer: The Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, and Shakespearean Character 5. Cervantes: The Play of the World 6. Montaigne and Molière: The Canonical Elusiveness of the Truth 7. Milton’s Satan and Shakespeare 8. Dr. Samuel Johnson, the Canonical Critic 9. Goethe’s Faust, Part Two: The Countercanonical Poem III. The Democratic Age 10. Canonical Memory in Early Wordsworth and Jane Austen’s Persuasion 11. Walt Whitman as Center of the American Canon 12. Emily Dickinson: Blanks, Transports, the Dark 13. The Canonical Novel: Dickens’s Bleak House, George Eliot’s Middlemarch 14. Tolstoy and Heroism 15. Ibsen: Trolls and Peer Gynt IV. The Chaotic Age 16. Freud: A Shakespearian Reading 17. Proust: The True Persuasion of Sexual Jealousy 18. Joyce’s Agon with Shakespeare 19. Woolf’s Orlando: Feminism as the Love of Reading 20. Kafka: Canonical Patience and “Indestructability” 21. Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa: Hispanic-Portuguese Whitman 22. Beckett…Joyce…Proust…Shakespeare V. Cataloging the Canon 23. Elegiac Conclusion Appendixes: A. The Theocratic Age B. The Aristocratic Age C. The Democratic Age D. The Chaotic Age: A Canonical Prophecy Index