Publisher's Synopsis
"The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom" is a major event in literary criticism. Edited by Graham Allen (University College Cork) and Roy Sellars (University of Southern Denmark, Kolding), the collection includes important essays on "The Book of J", "The Western Canon", and a host of new perspectives on Bloom's influence on poetry, the novel, canon-formation, institutional politics and political correctness, Biblical interpretation, post-colonialism, criticism and evaluation, literary theory and philosophy, and many other subjects. Never one to court favour with the latest literary or critical fad, Harold Bloom has been a towering figure in the study of literature and culture for over 45 years. He has only rarely, however, received due acknowledgement for the importance of his work within the increasingly professionalised and fractured world of academic literary criticism.;Today Bloom defiantly writes against institutionalised criticism and for a popular, non-academic audience, whose positive reception of books such as "The Western Canon", "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human", "How to Read and Why" and "Genius" marks Bloom out as perhaps the only living academic critic to have reached out so effectively to mass culture. This collection of essays, by younger academics alongside more established names, demonstrates that there are many inside and outside the academy who do value the work of the greatest reader of the last fifty years.
