The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages was published by Harcourt Brace in 1994 and became Bloom’s most commercially successful and most controversial book — a polemical defense of the literary canon at a moment when the concept of a canon was under sustained assault from multicultural, feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial critics. Bloom’s argument is simple and unyielding: great literature is determined by aesthetic quality — by what he calls “strangeness” — and not by the social identity of its author or the political utility of its message.
The book consists of essays on twenty-six canonical authors (from Dante and Shakespeare through Neruda and Beckett), each demonstrating what Bloom means by aesthetic value: originality of language, complexity of characterization, cognitive power, and the ability to make the reader think differently about human experience. Shakespeare stands at the center — Bloom’s Shakespeare is not merely the greatest writer in English but the inventor of human personality as we understand it — and the other figures are arranged in relation to him.
The polemical frame — Bloom’s attack on the “School of Resentment” (his term for critics who subordinate aesthetic to political criteria) — drew enormous media attention and made the book a bestseller. But the lasting value lies in the individual essays, which represent some of Bloom’s finest critical writing: his readings of Whitman, Dickinson, Tolstoy, and Proust are genuinely illuminating, regardless of one’s position on the canon wars.
Collecting The Western Canon
First edition (Harcourt Brace, New York, 1994): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $25–$75
- Signed copies: $75–$200