ABSTRACT:
The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom presents a major new collection of essays on the English-speaking world’s most famous literary critic. Ranging across Bloom’s numerous critical works on poetry, literature, canon-formation, Biblical interpretation and literary theory, these essays are a timely reminder of the profound influence that Harold Bloom’s work has had on a whole range of intellectual and literary disciplines. Published on the occasion of Bloom’s 75th birthday, The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom also contains original creative work and an afterword by Bloom himself.
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The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom is a major event in literary criticism. Edited by Graham Allen (University College Cork) and Roy Sellars (University of Southern Denmark, Kolding), the collection includes important essays on The Book of J, The Western Canon, and a host of new perspectives on Bloom’s influence on poetry, the novel, canon-formation, institutional politics and political correctness, Biblical interpretation, post-colonialism, criticism and evaluation, literary theory and philosophy, and many other subjects. Never one to court favour with the latest literary or critical fad, Harold Bloom has been a towering figure in the study of literature and culture for over 45 years. He has only rarely, however, received due acknowledgement for the importance of his work within the increasingly professionalised and fractured world of academic literary criticism. Today Bloom defiantly writes against institutionalised criticism and for a popular, non-academic audience, whose positive reception of books such as The Western Canon, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, How to Read and Why and Genius marks Bloom out as perhaps the only living academic critic to have reached out so effectively to mass culture. This collection of essays, by younger academics alongside more established names, demonstrates that there are many inside and outside the academy who do value the work of the greatest reader of the last fifty years.
