Books by Harold Bloom

A new book by America's leading literary critic on the uses of deep reading. Practical, inspirational and learned, How to Read and Why is Bloom's manifesto for the preponderance of written culture.

"The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists of ourselves." -Harold Bloom In The Art of Reading Poetry, Harold Bloom gives us his critical reflections on more than a half century devoted to reading, teaching, and writing about great verse, the literary achievements he loves most, and conveys his passionate concern for how a poem should be interpreted and appreciated. By illuminating such subjects as poetic voice, metaphor and allusion, and the nature of poetic value itself, Bloom presents an invaluable learning tool as a key to artistic expression.

America's most original and controversial literary critic writes trenchantly about forty-eight masterworks spanning the Western tradition-from Don Quixote to Wuthering Heights to Invisible Man-in his first book devoted exclusively to narrative fiction.Whether you have already read these books, are planning to, or simply care about the importance and power of fiction, Harold Bloom is your unparalleled guide to understanding them with new intimacy. In this valedictory volume, Yale professor Harold Bloom-who for more than half a century was regarded as America's most daringly original and controversial literary critic-gives us his only book devoted entirely to the art of the novel.With his hallmark percipience, uncanny erudition, and extraordinary devotion to sublimity, Bloom offers meditations on forty-eight essential works spanning the Western canon, from Don Quixote to The Book of Numbers; from Wuthering Heights to Absalom, Absalom!; from Les Misérables to Blood Meridian; from Vanity Fair to Invisible Man. Here are trenchant appreciations of fiction by, among many others, Austen, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, James, Conrad, Lawrence, Le Guin, and Sebald.

This is the book that introduced deconstruction as a tool for literary and cultural theorists throughout the English-speaking world, and set the ball rolling for the subsequent controversies over the use of theory to study liuterature.

Uncovers the mystery of both Prince Hamlet and the play, how both prince and drama are able to break through the conventions of theatrical mimesis and the representation of character, making us question the very nature of theatrical illusion.

An anthology of poems which attempts to give readers the possession of six centuries of great British and American poetry.

An analysis of the kabbalah, a mystical Judaic system. This book provides a study of the Kabbablah itself, of its commentators - the 'revisionary ratios' they employed - and of its significance as a model for contemporary criticism.

Bloom surveys with majestic view the literature of the West from the Old Testament to Samuel Beckett. In so doing, he uncovers the truth that all our attempts to call any strong work more sacred than another are merely political and social formulations.

A study of the Romantic poets and the relation between tradition and the individual artist. For this second edition Bloom offers a new introduction which explains the genesis of his thinking and the subsequent influence of the book on literary criticism.