Dramatists and Dramas: A Collection of Critical Essays (Bloom's 20th Anniversary Collection) [Paperback]

Harold Bloom (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 307 pages
• Publisher: Checkmark Books (October 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0791097269
• ISBN-13: 978-0791097267
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #890,853 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Harold Bloom is a Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than thirty books include The Best Poems of the English Language, The Art of Reading Poetry, and The Book of J. He is a MacArthur Prize Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, including the Academy's Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the International Prize of Catalonia, and the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars 'Regrettably' and 'Skillfully' do not equate., October 24, 2008

By 

Darian L. "N.L.Y." (London) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dramatists and Dramas: A Collection of Critical Essays (Bloom's 20th Anniversary Collection) (Paperback)

Having been a reader of Bloom for some time, his new collections I've been purchasing.

As an example, Novelists and Novels had some arguable omissions (where's Dorian Grey?, I thought for a moment.), but I'm not looking for absolute comprehensiveness, and was so much satisfied with the sheer nearness of comprehension he'd managed that any true complaint would be silliness.

Naturally, I'm reading these for Harold Bloom's opinions. They interest me, and they are diverse enough to make exhausting them an amiably impossible task. With this, he did pretty much the one thing that could bugger me into silliness and complaint: he left a great deal of those out.

Well, not even that, he left the Wrong Ones out. You include O'Neill and forget Racine? You say nothing of Calderon and write speculations on the paucity of theater after Shakepseare in Arthur Miller's comically long section? Strindberg - which I was searching for his opinion on - is gone, apparently replaced with a myriad of rather boring 20th Century playwrights.

He owns up to these, and others, in his introduction. The book covers the requisite Athenians, and then devotes a solid third of the book to Shakespeare, which would be fantastic, if I hadn't read his titanic tome of everything he says here and then some: Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

Okay, I loved to hear him on Moliere. Thank you Tom Stoppard. Oh, and gracious me, it's about time I encountered someone who could say that about Brecht. Pirandello is here.

I grant him that all this series amounts to is a collection of things written prior, but all the same: Apologizing for your major absences does not fulfill the absence.