Harold Bloom - The Book of J & other works (22 books)

HAROLD BLOOM (b. 1930) is an American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities and English at Yale University. His works have polarized opinion for many years, especially among established literary scholars. He has been called "probably the most celebrated literary critic in the United States" and "America's best-known man of letters", but he has also been dismissed by critics as an "outdated oddity." Whatever you may think of Bloom's conclusions, no one can dispute his deep, abiding passion for poetry and literature.

Early books such as THE VISIONARY COMPANY (1961) were creative studies of the Romantic poets and their work, then out of fashion. Bloom first made waves in literary circles with THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE (1973). The work was seen as controversial for advancing the idea that poets have a difficult connection to those who came before them, that living poets are striving to achieve their place in literary history by trying to outdo or "misread" earlier writers.

One of Bloom’s most controversial popular works appeared in his commentary on THE BOOK OF J (1990), published with new translations of selected sections of the Pentateuch. In it, Bloom speculated that the earliest known texts of the Bible were written by a woman who lived during the time of David and Solomon and that the texts are literary rather than religious ones. This work was one of a number of his books -- including THE AMERICAN RELIGION (1992), OMENS OF MILLENNIUM (1996), JESUS AND YAHWEH (2005), FALLEN ANGELS (2007), and THE SHADOW OF A GREAT ROCK (2011) -- to deal with religious subjects and sacred texts.

Bloom stirred up further debate with THE WESTERN CANON (1994), a bestseller that focuses on 26 works he considered sublime and representative of their nations and of the Western canon. Besides analyses of the canon's various representative works, the major concern of the volume is reclaiming literature from those he calls the "School of resentment", the mostly academic critics who espouse a social or political purpose in reading. A feminist or Marxist reading of Hamlet would tell us something about feminism and Marxism, Bloom argues, but probably nothing about Hamlet itself.

Bloom continued to both praise and analyze the literary canon in such books as SHAKESPEARE: THE INVENTION OF THE HUMAN (1998), HOW TO READ AND WHY (2000), and HAMLET: POEM UNLIMITED (2003). He recently returned to the study of influence, the subject that established his critical reputation, in THE ANATOMY OF INFLUENCE (2011).

This collection also includes Bloom's most recent offering, THE DAEMON KNOWS (2015), in which he pairs a number of canonical American authors, exploring the relationship of each to the "daemon" -- the spark of genius or Orphic muse -- in their creation and helping us understand their writing with new immediacy and relevance.


The following books are in PDF and/or ePUB format as noted:

* THE AMERICAN RELIGION (1992; Chu Hartley, 2013). Second edition, with a new Afterword by the author. -- ePUB

* THE ANATOMY OF INFLUENCE: Literature as a Way of Life (Yale UP, 2011) -- PDF + ePUB

* THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford UP, 2007). Second edition. -- PDF

* BLAKE'S APOCALYPSE: A Study in Poetic Argument (Doubleday, 1963) -- PDF

* THE BOOK OF J (Grove Weidenfeld, 1990). Translated by David Rosenberg and Interpreted by Harold Bloom -- PDF

* THE DAEMON KNOWS: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime (Spiegel & Grau, 2015) -- ePUB

* DECONSTRUCTION AND CRITICISM (Continuum, 1979). With additional contributions by Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey H. Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller -- PDF

* FALLEN ANGELS (Yale UP, 2007). Illuminated by Mark Podwal -- PDF

* GENIUS: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (Warner, 2002) -- PDF

* HAMLET: Poem Unlimited (Riverhead, 2003) -- PDF

* HOW TO READ AND WHY (Touchstone, 2000) -- PDF

* JESUS AND YAHWEH: The Names Divine (Riverhead, 2005) -- PDF

* OMENS OF MILLENNIUM: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (Riverhead, 1996) -- PDF

* POETRY AND REPRESSION: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (Yale UP, 1976) -- PDF

* RUIN THE SACRED TRUTHS: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (Harvard, 1989) -- PDF

* THE SHADOW OF A GREAT ROCK: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible (Yale UP, 2011) -- ePUB

* SHAKESPEARE: The Invention of the Human (Riverhead, 1998). -- PDF scanned by and reproduced with the kind permission of @pharmakate.

* THE TANNER LECTURES ON HUMAN VALUES (Utah UP, 1997) -- PDF

* TILL I END MY SONG: A Gathering of Last Poems (HarperCollins, 2010). Edited with commentaries by Harold Bloom. -- ePUB

* THE VISIONARY COMPANY: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (Doubleday, 1961) -- PDF

* THE WESTERN CANON: The Books and School of the Ages (Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994) -- ePUB + PDF scanned by and reproduced with the kind permission of @pharmakate.

* YEATS (Oxford UP, 1970) -- PDF