Harold Bloom
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Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?" is the crucial question with which renowned literary critic Harold Bloom begins this impassioned book on the pleasures and benefits of reading well. For more than forty years, Bloom has transformed college students into lifelong readers with his unrivaled love for literature. Now, at a time when faster and easier electronic media threatens to eclipse the practice of reading, Bloom...
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Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afro-centrism, and the New Historicism.
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There is very little evidence of the historical Jesus--who he was, what he said. As Bloom writes, "There is not a sentence concerning Jesus in the entire New Testament composed by anyone who ever had met the unwilling King of the Jews." Bloom has used his unsurpassed skills as a literary critic to examine the character of Jesus, noting the inconsistencies, contradictions, and logical flaws throughout the Gospels. He also examines the character of...
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From the ambitious and mad titular character to his devilish wife Lady Macbeth to the moral and noble Banquo to the mysterious Three Witches, Macbeth is one of William Shakespeare's more brilliantly populated plays and remains among the most widely read, performed in innovative productions set in a vast array of times and locations, from Nazi Germany to Revolutionary Cuba. Macbeth is a distinguished warrior hero, who over the course of the play, transforms...
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Presents the story of Dr. Frankenstein and his obsessive experiment that leads to the creation of a monstrous and deadly creature.
"First published in 1818, Frankenstein electrified the world with its haunting exploration of reckless innovation, misplaced justice, and what makes a man or a monster. This keepsake edition presents Mary Shelley's 1831 revision, which reflects significant shifts in her philosophy and includes her introduction to the...
11) Don Quixote
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""The final and greatest utterance of the human mind." -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky. A founding work of modern Western literature, Cervantes' masterpiece has been translated into more than 60 languages and the novel's elderly knight, Don Quixote, and his loyal squire, Sancho Panza, rank among fiction's most recognized characters. This monumental parody of chivalric romances and epic of heroic idealism presents a strikingly contemporary narrative that also...
12) Hamlet
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"One of the most frequently read and performed of all stage works, Shakespeare's Hamlet is unsurpassed in its complexity and richness. Now the most extensively annotated version of Hamlet to date makes the play completely accessible to readers in the twenty-first century. It has been carefully assembled with students, teachers, and the general reader in mind." "Eminent linguist and translator Burton Raffel offers generous help with vocabulary and...