Literary Revisionism and the Burden of Modernity

"This is a brilliant and moving study of perhaps the most brilliant and moving close-reader, theoretician of literary history, and humanist of our time: Harold Bloom. while it is possible to feel towards Bloom 'the debt immense of endless gratitude' just for his infallible ear--his omniscient and merciful reading of the poetic heart and memory--Mileur does more: He takes seriously Boom's 'sorrows of literary history' and interprets this melancholy not just as Bloom's ruling passion but as a central feature of the post-enlightenment poet's motive and message. To read this book is to feel impelled to discriminate more radically between the twentieth century's most creative, critical enlighteners and those evening mists, from the Eliotic to the deconstructionist, who have glided at academic heels and slithered into momentary attention. It is also to understand the truly revisionary character of the Romantic poets themselves, defending against the future, against death, through multifarious fictions of continuity with the past." --Leslie Brisman "I don't see how this brilliant book can fail to gain a very large and very enthusiastic academic audience. Mileur not only explains the provenance of "revisionism--or, more simply put, the current panic of literary criticism at its own validity-but he relates that contemporary phenomenon to the history of Gnostic thought and to the sheer business of teaching literature to the unconverted with remarkable skill and eloquence." --Frank McConnell