"Since the literary canon is at issue here, I include only those religious, philosophical, historical, and scientific writings that are themselves of great aesthetic interest. Quotations from Blooms book at the start of each section were selected by from whom I also copied the list (which I have reformatted).īonus: If you can bear it, here's nearly 48 minutes of Bloom discussing the canon with Canadian writer Eleanor Wachtel on the CBC back in 1995. I present Bloom's list here in its entirety, with links to those entries which have Listings. In it, he defended the very concept of a "canon" by discussing 26 of its central writers (including Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Borges).Īt the end of the book is a lengthy appendix-over 35 double-columned pages!-in four parts, containing those writers he considers canonical.Īccording to Josh Jones ( on Open Culture), "Bloom later disavowed the list, claiming that his editor insisted on it." Nevertheless, it's an entertaining exercise, and contains a few gems I hadn't known about before. In 1994, American literary critic and Yale humanities professor Harold Bloom published a book entitled The Western Canon.
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