The American canon Literary genius from Emerson to Pynchon

Review by Choice Review

In this volume, Mikics collects 50 years' worth of Bloomian criticism. The 45 essays--covering 47 writers from Emerson to Pynchon--are, like much of Bloom's writing, full of extreme aphorisms (e.g., Emerson is the "inescapable theorist of all subsequent American writing"). Among these pronouncements, however, readers will find sharp and incisive (re)introductions to what Bloom considered the canon of American literature. Squabblers may grumble over "who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out" in Bloom's estimation (although to be fair, the essays were chosen by Mikics). Wise readers will allow Bloom's passionate assessments of why his chosen writers are significant to surprise, provoke, and enlighten them. Bloom quotes profusely, and he urges readers to read the writers in his American canon, be it for the first time or the tenth. This book will serve well as a guide to American literature for the uninitiated or as a sounding board for more experienced readers. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Jeffrey W. Miller, Gonzaga University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Literary critic and scholar Bloom identifies the classics of American letters and what makes them so in this rich compilation of five decades of criticism. The 47 featured writers and the chronological discussions begin with Ralph Waldo Emerson, "the pragmatic origin of our literary culture." While some essays offer a close reading of Bloom's favorite works--Walt Whitman and William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying receive the loftiest praise--most analyze authors by their preoccupations--Bloom reads Flannery O'Connor, for instance, through the lens of her Catholicism--and their precursors, following Bloom's formative theories about the anxiety of influence. As a group, the essays demonstrate some unevenness in depth and timeliness due to being excerpted from other works, but the volume is made cohesive by Bloom's predominating interests in gnosticism, Romanticism, and Shakespeare, and a critical language free of literary theory or cultural politics. Bloom's values are aesthetic beauty and rhetorical originality; he admires "self-reliant, self-radiant" Emily Dickinson and the "vast consciousness" of Henry James and calls Ursula K. Le Guin's "sensibility... very nearly unique in contemporary fiction." Ambitious, authoritative, and certainly arguable, Bloom's compendium is an achievement of immense use and interest to literature students and general readers alike. (Oct.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Bloom (Sterling Professor of Humanities, Yale Univ.; The Anxiety of Influence) is America's grandfather of literary criticism and scholarship. This compilation of lightly revised, previously published essays focuses on 47 different writers, with most pieces touching on aspects of Bloom's major contribution to literary theory, "the anxiety of influence," while examining each writer's "daemon." Bloom is a more astute critic of poets than prose writers. As such, entries concentrated on the poets are the most rewarding. Readers expecting biographical sketches or historical context will be sorely disappointed, as most of the chapters deal with an author's primary work, for example, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), and Thomas Pynchon's eight-page "Byron the Bulb" section of Gravity's Rainbow (1974). Though Bloom is widely read, his literary world of American writers is myopic, as most of the authors here, by his reasoning, undoubtedly wrestled with the influence of white, male figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and Wallace Stevens. VERDICT Because of the esoteric nature of this book, it is primarily geared toward collections with Bloom's other works and his most ardent readers.--Brian Flota, James Madison Univ., Harrisonburg, VA

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A deep consideration of significant American writers, from Emerson to Pynchon.For more than 50 years, Bloom (Humanities/Yale Univ.; Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism, 2019, etc.) has produced incisive literary criticism, offering both close readings of writers' works and their place in what he considers to be the American canon. Drawing from published volumes, several long out of print, and assorted other sources, Mikics (English/Univ. of Houston; Bellow's People, 2016, etc.) gathers a sampling of Bloom's essays on writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to represent the scope and depth of the critic's capacious interests. Organized chronologically by the writer's birthdate, the collection begins with Emerson, whom Bloom considers "the inescapable theorist of all subsequent American writing. From his moment to ours, American authors either are in his tradition, or else in a counter-tradition originating in opposition to him." Bloom is much focused on "the anxiety of influence" between one writer and another, a theme he explored in one of his early books, The Anxiety of Influence (1973), and which emerges throughout his criticism. Essays tend to focus on what Bloom considers a writer's exemplary work rather than their entire oeuvre: The Portrait of a Lady dominates the essay on Henry James, whom Bloom deems the "subtlest of novelistic masters (excepting Proust)." He regards Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon a greater achievement than Beloved and The Great Gatsby more worthy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "canonical status" than "the seriously flawed Tender Is the Night." Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts seems to Bloom a "remorseless masterpiece," far above anything else West produced and surpassed only by Faulkner's most well-known novels. Although he finds "West's spirit" in some of Pynchon's novels, "the negative sublimity of Miss Lonelyhearts proves to be beyond Pynchon's reach, or perhaps his ambition." Besides defending his own evaluations, Bloom sets his views alongside those of many major critics, including Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Nina Baym, Irving Howe, and Northrop Frye.An erudite tour of the American literary landscape from one of its most important observers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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