Remember the controversy attending the publication of The Western Canon? Well, hold on to your mortarboards -- critic, scholar, and Falstaffian gadfly Harold Bloom returns with his magnum opus, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Whether deriding the tenets of the so-called "School of Resentment" or trumpeting the 39 plays of William Shakespeare as "the fixed center of the Western canon," Bloom is here at his audacious best, offering a passionate analysis of the ways Shakespeare not only represented human nature as we know it today but actually created it. Infusing literary criticism with an unusual narrative force, Bloom helps us to understand ourselves through literature, revealing "not only of how meaning gets started...but also of how new modes of consciousness come into being."
Ralph Waldo Emerson's brillance as a prose writer has too long overshadowed his remarkable gifts as a poet. Collected Poems and Translations gathers both published and unpublished work - poems left in manuscript at his death and hitherto available only in drastically edited or specialized scholarly versions - to offer all readers for the first time the full range of Emerson's poetry.
