Shakespeare

Condition: BRAND NEW ISBN: 9780007292844 Author(s): Harold Bloom Format: Paperback Illustrator: Maria Surducan Language: English Year: 2008 Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Pages: 768

Description: 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 ShakespeareA?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 criticsA? explanations, whose work is of greater influence in the modern age even than the Bible? This book is a visionary summation of Harold BloomA?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: A?The plays remain the outward limit of human achievement: aesthetically, cognitively, in certain ways morally, even spiritually. They abide beyond the end of the mindA?s reach; we cannot catch up to them. Shakespeare will go on explaining us in part because he invented usA?¦ A? In a chronological survey of each of the plays, Bloom explores the supra-human personalities of ShakespeareA?s great protagonists: Hamlet, Lear, Falstaff, Rosalind, Juliet. They represent the apogee of ShakespeareA?s art, that art which is BritainA?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.

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