Bibliographic Information

The daemon knows : literary greatness and the American sublime

Harold Bloom

Oxford University Press, 2015

Available at  / 6 libraries

Search this Book/Journal

Note

Includes index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

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.

Table of Contents

  • Why These Twelve?
  • Daemonic Preludium
  • 1. Walt Whitman and Herman Melville
  • 2. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson
  • 3. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James
  • 4. Mark Twain and Robert Frost
  • 5. Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot
  • 6. William Faulkner and Hart Crane
  • Coda: The Place of the Daemon
  • Notes
  • Index

by "Nielsen BookData"

Details

  • NCID
    BB20175507
  • ISBN
    • 9780198753599
  • Country Code
    uk
  • Title Language Code
    eng
  • Text Language Code
    eng
  • Place of Publication
    Oxford
  • Pages/Volumes
    xvi, 524 p.
  • Size
    22 cm
  • Classification
  • Subject Headings
Page Top