Scribner Book Company
Lear: The Great Image of Authority
Key Metrics
- Harold Bloom
- Scribner Book Company
- Paperback
- 9781501164200
- 8.1 X 5.4 X 0.6 inches
- 0.3 pounds
- Literary Criticism > Shakespeare
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
King Lear is one of the most famous and compelling characters in literature. The aged, abused monarch--a man in his eighties, like Bloom himself--is at once the consummate figure of authority and the classic example of the fall from grace and widely agreed to be Shakespeare's most moving, tragic hero.
Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Lear with wisdom, joy, exuberance, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are seventeen and another when we are forty, Bloom writes about his shifting understanding--over the course of his own lifetime--of this endlessly compelling figure, so that the book also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity.
Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare's characters make. Now he brings that insight to his measured, thoughtful assessment of a key play in the Shakespeare canon (Kirkus Reviews). Lear is a short, superb book that has a depth of observation acquired from a lifetime of study (Publishers Weekly).
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