The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

The author explores Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. In this book, the author argues against ideology in literary criticism; laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; and tackles topics including multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism. Insisting instead upon "the autonomy of the aesthetic," the author places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon. Shakespeare has become the touchstone for all writers who come before and after him, whether playwrights poets or storytellers, the author argues. In the creation of character, he maintains, Shakespeare has no true precursor and has left no one after him untouched. Milton, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Ibsen, Joyce, and Beckett were all indebted to Shakespeare; Tolstoy and Freud rebelled against him; and Dante, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, Whitman, Dickinson, Proust, the modern Hispanic and Portuguese writers Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa are exquisite examples of how canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition.--adapted from jacket.… (more)