The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present

by Harold Bloom

Book Overview

Harold Bloom surveys with majestic view the literature of the West from the Old Testament to Samuel Beckett. He provocatively rereads the Yahwist (or J) writer, Jeremiah, Job, Jonah, the Iliad, the Aeneid, Dante's Divine Comedy, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, the Henry IV plays, Paradise Lost, Blake's Milton, Wordsworth's Prelude, and works by Freud, Kafka, and Beckett. In so doing,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674780280
• ISBN13: 9780674780286
• Release Date: September 1991
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 214 Pages
• Weight: 0.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

The slightly less strong Bloom

This is not the best of Bloom. It contains much which will be found in the later bestselling works but here comes in a more disjointed and often lackluster fashion. Bloom too exaggerates here in the name- dropping of critics, in the making of what may seem at times an esoteric set of arguments which only literary critics are capable of understanding. Still as enthusiast and great reader and lover of the world's best Literature Bloom provides much here worth reading and thinking about. This is not an easy work to read, and the arguments are often tangled. But it is like all of bloom's work rich in ideas , and interesting suggestions.