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Everlasting Fudge

Theo Tait: The Difficult Fiction of Cynthia Ozick, 19 May 2005

The Bear Boy 
by Cynthia Ozick.
Weidenfeld, 310 pp., £12.99, March 2005, 0 297 84808 9
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... Throne. Then the taciturn little Canaanite idols call him, in the language of the spheres, kike. Harold Bloom, no less, has described this story and ‘Envy’ as ‘novellas unequalled in her generation’. And there is, doubtless, much to be admired: the manic wit, the deft rhetoric, the play of recondite ideas. It’s also interesting to see ...

Maybe he made it up

Terry Eagleton: Faking It, 6 June 2002

The Forger’s Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature 
by Nick Groom.
Picador, 351 pp., £20, April 2002, 9780330374323
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... literary works are made up of recycled bits and pieces of other works, so that, in the words of Harold Bloom, ‘the meaning of a poem is another poem.’ This doctrine of intertextuality is not to be confused with good old-fashioned literary influence. Such influences are mostly conscious and generally sporadic, whereas for Postmodernism it is ...

Anger and Dismay

Denis Donoghue, 19 July 1984

Literary Education: A Revaluation 
by James Gribble.
Cambridge, 182 pp., £16.50, November 1983, 0 521 25315 2
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Reconstructing Literature 
edited by Laurence Lerner.
Blackwell, 218 pp., £15, August 1983, 0 631 13323 2
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Counter-Modernism in Current Critical Theory 
by Geoffrey Thurley.
Macmillan, 216 pp., £20, October 1983, 0 333 33436 1
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... has the force to understand force from within itself.’ Blurring differences, Gribble treats Harold Bloom as an adept of Deconstruction, for no reason except that Bloom took part, a few years ago, in a bizarre exercise published as Deconstruction and Criticism. Structuralism, Deconstruction and ...

A Snake, a Flame

T.J. Clark: Blake at the Ashmolean, 5 February 2015

William Blake: Apprentice and Master 
Ashmolean Museum, until 1 March 2015Show More
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... comes back to life – of his technique. But ‘I hope’ is a token of some viewers’ doubts. Harold Bloom, at the beginning of his Blake’s Apocalypse (still a marvellous guide), has this disarming aside: I have slighted Blake’s illustrations to his engraved poems, though to do so is to go against Blake’s intentions … Blake’s ...

Old America

W.C. Spengemann, 7 January 1988

Look homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe 
by David Herbert Donald.
Bloomsbury, 579 pp., £16.95, April 1987, 0 7475 0004 5
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From this moment on: America in 1940 
by Jeffrey Hart.
Crown, 352 pp., $19.95, February 1987, 9780517557419
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... historian may not have intended. Donald surely did not stand Wolfe upon his wobbly legs so that Harold Bloom could knock him down again in the New York Times Book Review. No more are Hart’s thematic parallels among the characters of Hitler, Churchill and Roosevelt, or among the statist designs of the New Deal, the New York World’s Fair, Nazi ...

Arctic Habits

Tony Tanner, 25 May 1995

Emerson: The Mind on Fire 
by Robert Richardson.
California, 668 pp., £27, June 1995, 0 520 08808 5
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... book is very much of its time. Since the enthusiastic re-evaluation of Emerson by Stanley Cavell, Harold Bloom and, most importantly, Richard Poirier, Emerson’s stock has probably never stood higher. He seems, temporarily, to have moved into a privileged place beyond criticism. But I wonder if that is good for him. In 1887 Henry James reviewed a Memoir ...

Hasped and Hooped and Hirpling

Terry Eagleton: Beowulf, 11 November 1999

Beowulf 
translated by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 104 pp., £14.99, October 1999, 9780571201136
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... down with his pen to ‘the first stratum of the language’ and appropriated his birthright. As Harold Bloom might less decorously put it, the belated bastard offspring has now installed himself as the founding patriarch. It might be argued that Heaney’s anxious need for this move to be legitimated is a sign of the cultural colonisation it aims to ...

No one hates him more

Joshua Cohen: Franzen on Kraus, 7 November 2013

The Kraus Project 
by Jonathan Franzen.
Fourth Estate, 318 pp., £18.99, October 2013, 978 0 00 751743 5
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... on his Fulbright trip to Germany; about his relationships with women, and with the spectres of Harold Bloom and Pynchon. He writes about envy, and how it encourages productivity, and how it limits productivity, and about the folly of the very notion of artistic productivity. He writes against blogs, yet allows a comparison between Die Fackel and ...

Sexist

John Bayley, 10 December 1987

John Keats 
by John Barnard.
Cambridge, 172 pp., £22.50, March 1987, 0 521 26691 2
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Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare 
by R.S. White.
Athlone, 250 pp., £25, March 1987, 0 485 11298 1
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... literary world’. He even wrote, and cancelled, a knowingly grotesque first stanza, which Harold Bloom maintained gave the Ode its proper tone. But there is no proper tone here, any more than there is in the other Odes – only the ‘human and fictive’, interchanging in their typically and unmisgivingly Keatsian manner: real girls and marble ...

Wordsworth and the Well-Hidden Corpse

Marilyn Butler, 6 August 1992

The Lyrical Ballads: Longman Annotated Texts 
edited by Michael Mason.
Longman, 419 pp., £29.99, April 1992, 0 582 03302 0
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Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Literary Possession 
by Susan Eilenberg.
Oxford, 278 pp., £30, May 1992, 0 19 506856 4
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The Politics of Nature: Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries 
by Nicholas Roe.
Macmillan, 186 pp., £35, April 1992, 0 333 52314 8
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... true spiritual revolution after the false, material and murderous revolution ushered in by 1789. Harold Bloom, Hillis Miller and Paul de Man see something profoundly representative in Wordsworth’s sudden retreat from the public to the private sphere – the threshold of modernity, the moment when the political and social goals of history become either ...

Preposterous Timing

Hal Foster: Medieval Modern Art, 8 November 2012

Medieval Modern: Art out of Time 
by Alexander Nagel.
Thames and Hudson, 312 pp., £29.95, November 2012, 978 0 500 23897 4
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Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum 
by Amy Knight Powell.
Zone, 369 pp., £24.95, May 2012, 978 1 935408 20 8
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... the (distant) past. This is a posture, less projective than retroactive, that T.S. Eliot and Harold Bloom ascribed to the ‘strong’ poet. It is also the approach of such strong theorists as Althusser, Lacan and Foucault when they returned to Marx, Freud and Nietzsche to read them anew. Nagel and Powell think they perform this kind of critical ...

Bobbery

James Wood: Pushkin’s Leave-Taking, 20 February 2003

Pushkin: A Biography 
by T.J. Binyon.
HarperCollins, 731 pp., £30, September 2002, 0 00 215084 0
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... occasioning a formal elegy in which Pushkin parodies conventional literary lachrymosity (‘the bloom has withered on the bough’ etc etc) only to follow it with a passage in which, having mourned the death to poetry that Lensky’s untimely snatch may represent, he revises his judgment, adding that it is more likely that Lensky would have become an idle ...

Writing the Night

Hugh Haughton, 25 January 1996

Selected Poems 
by David Gascoyne.
Enitharmon, 253 pp., £8.95, November 1994, 1 870612 34 5
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... to reconcile? Can a poet of the later 20th century still convincingly align him or herself to what Harold Bloom, writing of the canonical English Romantics, called the Visionary Company? How do you write what Gascoyne calls ‘post-Auschwitz theology’? Why did his precocious gifts fizzle out after the publication of A Vagrant in 1951? Indeed, why did so ...

Getting Ready to Exist

Adam Phillips, 17 July 1997

A Centenary Pessoa 
edited by Eugénio Lisboa and L.C. Taylor.
Carcanet, 335 pp., £25, May 1995, 9780856359361
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The Keeper of Sheep 
by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Edwin Honig and Susan Brown.
Sheep Meadow, 135 pp., $12.95, September 1997, 1 878818 45 7
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The Book of Disquietude 
by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Richard Zenith.
Carcanet, 323 pp., £9.95, January 1997, 1 85754 301 7
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... of our cultural insularity that it has taken so long for Pessoa’s work to become known. When Harold Bloom recently listed him among the 26 authors who comprise, for him, the fabled Western Canon, Time magazine implied that this was a symptom of Bloom’s pretentious interest in ‘academic obscurities’. It will ...

Bunny Hell

Christopher Tayler: David Gates, 27 August 2015

A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me 
by David Gates.
Serpent’s Tail, 314 pp., £12.99, August 2015, 978 1 78125 491 2
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Jernigan 
by David Gates.
Serpent’s Tail, 339 pp., £8.99, August 2015, 978 1 78125 490 5
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... endearing tic of giving everyone the same taste in bedtime reading (Austen, Dickens, Wodehouse, Harold Bloom). The main change is that the younger women have aged in tandem with the older men who have affairs with them, and become more likely to be used as the point-of-view character. Gates deals with any suspicions we might have that he’s given this ...

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