Bloomsbury The Anatomy of Bloom: Harold Bloom and the Study of Influence and Anxiety

Here at last is a comprehensive introduction to the career of America's leading intellectual. The Anatomy of Bloom surveys Harold Bloom's life as a literary critic, exploring all of his books in chronological order, to reveal that his work, and especially his classic The Anxiety of Influence, is best understood as an expression of reprobate American Protestantism and yet haunted by a Jewish fascination with the Holocaust. Heys traces Bloom's intellectual development from his formative years spent as a poor second-generation immigrant in the Bronx to his later eminence as an international literary phenomenon. He argues that, as the quintessential living embodiment of the American dream, Bloom's career-path deconstructs the very foundations of American Protestantism. Review In The Anatomy of Bloom, Alistair Heys offers a clear and compelling account of Harold Bloom's intellectual development and his vital contributions to contemporary critical discourse. Truly a masterpiece of exegesis and analysis, this book elucidates the origins of Bloom's recurrent fascination with the concept of poetic influence and describes Bloom's intellectual journey through the realms of Shakespearean drama, British Romantic poetry, post-structuralism and New Historicism. Along the way, Bloom's agonistic relationship with Judaism and Protestantism is revealed as an essential key to understanding his critical engagement with the Western literary tradition. The Anatomy of Bloom provides helpful commentary and stimulating insights into the enduring significance of Harold Bloom's literary criticism and theory. --James McKusick, Professor of English and Dean of the Davidson Honors College, University of Montana, USA, and author of Coleridge's Philosophy of Language and Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology About the Author Alistair Heys is Lecturer in Romantic Literature at the Paisii Hilendarski University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria. He is the author of R.S. Thomas and Romanticism (2004) and editor of Byron and the Isles of Imagination (2009)