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The Western Canon

The Books and School of the Ages

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The Western Canon

By: Harold Bloom
Narrated by: James Armstrong
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About this listen

Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism.

Insisting instead upon "the autonomy of aesthetic," Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon. Shakespeare has become the touchstone for all writers who come before and after him, whether playwrights, poets, or storytellers. In the creation of character, Bloom maintains, Shakespeare has no true precursor and has left no one after him untouched. Milton, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Ibsen, Joyce, and Beckett were all indebted to him; Tolstoy and Freud rebelled against him; and while Dante, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, Whitman, Dickinson, Proust, and the modern Hispanic and Portuguese writers Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa are exquisite examples of how canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition.

©1994 by Harold Bloom (P)1997 by Blackstone Audiobooks Essays Literary History & Criticism World Nonfiction Shakespeare Tradition Middle Ages
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The chapters on this audiobook , DO NOT MATCH. Very frustrating and hard to follow when reading individual chapters of the book.

Chapters

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Bloom’s best work. Read it several times. Unfortunately, the quality of the sound is rather poor. Possibly terrible.

Bloom’s best work. Sound quality: poor.

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A classic utterly ruined by one of the worst recordings in the Audible library. Hiss, click, and out of control treble. It sounds as if it was recorded on Tandy's cheapest C60s. A disgrace.

Awful sound

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This recording, done in an underwater telephone box, is delivered to you via an electric shaver. Truly atrocious sound quality - what a pity. How someone had the nerve to release this shoddily produced audiobook, I cannot imagine.

Atrocious sound quality

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