"Bloom is very interested in the powerful "characters" which are thrown up in the process. He celebrates Goethe's "unique and overwhelming personality", Montaigne's "highly original personality" and various critics' "vehement and colorful personalities". In this he takes his cue from Johnson, who reinvested the art of biographical criticism. For Bloom lacks Johnson's restraint; instead he is imbued with a strain of neo-romantic fervour which allows him to speak continually of the "sublime" and to invoke the principles of "strangeness" and "originality" as the canonical qualities of great writing. He is also preoccupied by the actual characters within various fictions and imagines, for example, Falstaff and the Wife of Bath in some titanic confrontation. He is not very far here from Hazlitt or Lamb, but he is a Romantic essayist who has also been touched by Pater's aestheticism. It is hard, however, to think of a better tradition for any literary critic."
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Literary criticsNon-fiction authors from the United StatesJews from the United StatesCritics from the United StatesPeople from New York City
Original Language: English
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A review of The Western Canon
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Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom (July 11, 1930 – October 14, 2019) was an American literary critic and writer. He was Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, a former Professor of English at New York University, and the author of over twenty-five books.
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