Harold Bloom's Shakespeare

by Desmet, Christy; Sawyer, Robert J.

• ISBN13: 9780312239558
• ISBN10: 0312239556
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-01-12
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Harold Bloom is one of the most influential-and controversial-of contemporary Shakespeare critics. These essays examine the sources and impact of his Shakespearean criticism. Through focused and sustained study of this writer as literary icon and his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human , the essays address a wide range of issues, from the cultural role of Shakespeare to the ethics of literary theory and criticism.

Author Biography

Christy Desmet is Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia. She is the author of Reading Shakespeare's Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity, and co-editor of Shakespeare and Appropriation.

Robert Sawyer is Assistant Professor of English at East Tennessee State University, and co-editor of Shakespeare and Appropriation.

Table of Contents

Contributors	ix
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction	1	(18)
Christy Desmet
Robert Sawyer
Part 1 Bardolatry/Bardography
Bloom's Shakespeare	19	(8)
Jay L. Halio
Bloom with a View	27	(6)
Terence Hawkes
The Case for Bardolatry: Harold Bloom Rescues Shakespeare from the Critics	33	(10)
William W. Kerrigan
Power, Pathos, Character	43	(22)
Gary Taylor
Inventing Us	65	(6)
Hugh Kenner
Part 2 Reading and Writing Shakespearean Character
Bloom, Bardolatry, and Characterolatry	71	(10)
Richard Levin
On the Value of Being a Cartoon, in Literature and in Life	81	(16)
Sharon O'Dair
Shakespeare: The Orientation of the Human	97	(12)
Mustapha Fahmi
``The play's the thing'': Shakespeare's Critique of Character (and Harold Bloom)	109	(16)
William R. Morse
On Harold Bloom's Nontheatrical Praise for Shakespeare's Lovers: Much Ado About Nothing and Antony and Cleopatra	125	(20)
Herbert Weil
Part 3 Anxieties of Influence
Romanticism Lost: Bloom and the Twilight of Literary Shakespeare	145	(22)
Edward Pechter
Looking for Mr. Goodbard: Swinburne, Resentment Criticism, and the Invention of Harold Bloom	167	(14)
Robert Sawyer
Shakespeare and the Invention of Humanism: Bloom on Race and Ethnicity	181	(18)
James R. Andreas
Shakespeare in Transit: Bloom, Shakespeare, and Contemporary Women's Writing	199	(14)
Caroline Cakebread
Part 4 Shakespeare as Cultural Capital
Harold Bloom as Shakespearean Pedagogue	213	(14)
Christy Desmet
King Lear in Their Time: On Bloom and Cavell on Shakespeare	227	(20)
Lawrence F. Rhu
``I am sure this Shakespeare will not do'': Anti-Semitism and the Limits of Bardolatry	247	(12)
David M. Schiller
The 2% Solution: What Harold Bloom Forgot	259	(10)
Linda Charnes
References	269	(18)
Index	287