The Daemon Knows

The Daemon Knows

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Summary

Celebrated American literary critic Harold Bloom turns his attention to the writers of his own national literary tradition, from Walt Whitman and Herman Melville to William Faulkner and Hart Crane. The distillation of a lifetime of criticism, it is one of Bloom's most profoundly personal books to date.

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The Daemon Knows by Harold Bloom

Hailed as 'the indispensable critic' by The New York Review of Books, Harold Bloom has for decades been sharing with readers and students his genius and passion for understanding literature and explaining why it matters. In The Daemon Knows, he turns his attention to the writers of his own national literature in a book that is one of his most incisive and profoundly personal to date. Pairing Walt Whitman with Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson with Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne with Henry James, Mark Twain with Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens with T. S. Eliot, and William Faulkner with Hart Crane, Bloom places these writers' works in conversation with one another, exploring their relationship to the 'daemon'-the spark of genius or Orphic muse-in their creation, and helping us understand their writing with new immediacy and relevance. It is above all the intensity of their preoccupation with the sublime, Bloom suggests, that distinguishes these American writers from their European predecessors. A product of five years of writing and a lifetime of reading and scholarship, The Daemon Knows may be Bloom's most masterly book yet.
rich in insights * Sydney Morning Herald *
.. the death of literature has been deferred once more. * Daily Telegraph *
the Yale literary scholar has added another remarkable treatise to his voluminous body of work * Huffington Post *
Bloom is... the last of the Titans. Literary Review, John Sutherland
a wonderful introduction from one of the most renowned critics of his generation * A Hermit's Progress *
Harold Bloom is a Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than forty books include The Anxiety of Influence, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, The Western Canon, and The American Religion. He is a MacArthur Prize Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, including the Academy's Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the Catalonia International Prize, and the Alfonso Reyes International Prize of Mexico. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and in New York City.
SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9780198753599
ISBN 10 0198753594
Title The Daemon Knows
Author Harold Bloom
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Hardback
Publisher Oxford University Press
Year published 2015-07-09
Number of pages 544
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.