The Anatomy of Bloom Harold Bloom and the Study of Influence and Anxiety

by Heys, Alistair

• ISBN13: 9781441120779
• ISBN10: 1441120777
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-07-31
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Here at last is a comprehensive introduction to the career of America's leading intellectual. The Anatomy of Bloom surveys Harold Bloom's life as a literary critic, exploring all of his books in chronological order, to reveal that his work, and especially his classic The Anxiety of Influence, is best understood as an expression of reprobate American Protestantism and yet haunted by a Jewish fascination with the Holocaust.

Heys traces Bloom's intellectual development from his formative years spent as a poor second-generation immigrant in the Bronx to his later eminence as an international literary phenomenon. He argues that, as the quintessential living embodiment of the American dream, Bloom's career-path deconstructs the very foundations of American Protestantism.

Author Biography

Alistair Heys is Lecturer in Romantic Literature at the University of Paisii Hilendarski, Bulgaria. He is the author of R.S. Thomas and Romanticism (2004) and editor of Byron and the Isles of Imagination (2009).

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Bloom's Gnosis
2. The Genealogy of Bloomian Deconstruction
3. The Anxiety of Zion: Bloom's Jewish Identity
4. Bloomian Agon and the Spirit of America
5. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index