Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human - Couverture rigide

Bloom, Harold

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1841150479 ISBN 13 : 9781841150475

Editeur : Fourth Estate Ltd, 1999

Synopsis

Harold Bloom, the doyen of American literary critics and author of The Western Canon, has spent a professional lifetime reading, writing about and teaching Shakespeare. In this magisterial interpretation, Bloom explains Shakespeare’s genius in a radical and provocative re-reading of the plays.

How to understand Shakespeare, whose ability so far exceeds his predecessors and successors, whose genius has defied generations of critics’ explanations, whose work is of greater influence in the modern age even than the Bible?

This book is a visionary summation of Harold Bloom’s reading of Shakespeare and in it he expounds a brilliant and far-reaching critical theory: that Shakespeare was, through his dramatic characters, the inventor of human personality as we have come to understand it. In short, Shakespeare invented our understanding of ourselves. He knows us better than we do:

’The plays remain the outward limit of human achievement: aesthetically, cognitively, in certain ways morally, even spiritually. They abide beyond the end of the mind’s reach; we cannot catch up to them. Shakespeare will go on explaining us in part because he invented us… ’

In a chronological survey of each of the plays, Bloom explores the supra-human personalities of Shakespeare’s great protagonists: Hamlet, Lear, Falstaff, Rosalind, Juliet. They represent the apogee of Shakespeare’s art, that art which is Britain’s most powerful and dominant cultural contribution to the world, here vividly recovered by an inspired and wise scholar at the height of his powers.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

One of the greatest literary critics in the world today, Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, Berg Professor of English at New York University, and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. He was described in the `New York Times’ as `a colossus among critics’.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Fourth Estate Ltd
• Date d'édition: 1999
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1841150479
• ISBN 13: 9781841150475
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 768
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible