Reading, writing and the influence of Harold Bloom takes the work of the world’s best-known living literary critic and discovers what it is like to read ‘with’, ‘against’ and ‘beyond’ his ideas.
The editors, Alan Rawes and Jonathon Shears, introduce the collection by assessing the impact of Bloom’s brand of agonistic criticism on literary critics and its ongoing relevance to a discipline attempting to redefine and settle on its collective goals. Firmly grounded in, though not confined to, Bloom’s first specialism of Romantic Studies, the volume contains essays that examine Bloom’s debts to high Romanticism, his quarrels with feminism, his resistance to historicism, the tensions with the ‘Yale School’ and his recent work on Shakespeare and genius. Crucially, chapters are also devoted to putting Bloom’s anxiety-themed ratios into practice on the poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and D. H. Lawrence, amongst others.
The Harold Bloom that emerges from this collection is by turns divisive and unifying, marginalised and central, radical and conservative.
Jadual kandungan
Notes on Contributors
Abbreviations
Introduction
Jonathon Shears and Alan Rawes
Reading With Bloom
1. Keats and his ‘Composite Precursor[s]’ in The Fall of Hyperion
Alan Rawes
2. The Decline of America: Bloom’s Monumental Theory of History . Alistair Heys
3. ‘Continuity in the self’: Wordsworth, Byron, Bloom
Jonathon Shears
4. The Blooming of Hamlet
James Soderholm
Reading Against Bloom
5. The Limits of ‘perfect solipsism’: Bloom’s Map and the
Origins of Shelley’s Dejection
Sally West
6. Apophrades, Adonais and the Return of the Shelleys
Graham Allen
7. Towards a Feminist Revisionism of an Aesthetics of Mastery:
Harold Bloom, neo-Romanticism and the Critical Sublime
Mary Orr
8. Childe Roland’s Literate Despair
Andrew M. Stauffer
Reading Beyond Bloom
9. Superscriptions of Bliss: Influence and Form in the Poetry of Lawrence
David Duff
10. How to Live with the Infinite Regress of Strong Misreading
Paul H. Fry
11. ‘The strong dead return’: The Transgressive Shades of Bloom’s Daemon
Julian Wolfreys
12. The Impossibility of Reading: Bloom and the Yale School of Criticism
Arthur Bradley
Index
Mengenai Pengarang
Jonathon Shears is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Aberystwyth University